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Romantic Anarche: The Philosophical and Literary
Anarchism of William Godwin
Jared M. McGeough
University of Western Ontario
Supervisor
Dr. Tilottama Rajan
The University of Western Ontario
Graduate Program in Theory and Criticism
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy
© Jared M. McGeough 2011
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ROMANTIC ANARCHE: THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND LITERARY ANARCHISM OF
WILLIAM GODWIN
(ROMANTIC ANARCHE: WILLIAM GODWIN)
Monograph
by
Jared McGeough
Graduate Program in Theory and Criticism
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctorate of Philosophy
The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies
The University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada
© Jared McGeough 2011
THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO
School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies
CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION
Supervisor
Examiners
______________________________
Dr. Tilottama Rajan
______________________________
Dr. Orrin Wang
Supervisory Committee
______________________________
Dr. Mark Franke
______________________________
Dr. Joel Faflak
______________________________
Dr. Monika Lee
______________________________
Dr.
______________________________
Dr. Jan Plug
The thesis by
Jared Michael McGeough
entitled:
Romantic Anarche: The Philosophical and Literary Anarchism of
William Godwin
is accepted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in Theory and Criticism
______________________
Date
_______________________________
Chair of the Thesis Examination Board
ii
Abstract
This study examines the philosophical and literary anarchism of William Godwin. Through
an analysis of several of Godwin‘s major works, including Political Justice (1793, 1796,
1798), ―Of History and Romance‖ (1798), and his novels Caleb Williams (1794), St. Leon
(1799) and Mandeville (1817), I argue that Godwin‘s relationship both to the intellectual
history of anarchism and its literary expression in the form of the historical romance is more
complex than has been recognized. In order to tease out this complexity, I approach Godwin
from the perspective of recent critics who reread the ideals of classical anarchism through
post-structuralist theory. Rather than reduce Godwin to contemporary approaches to
anarchism, however, this study demonstrates that Godwin‘s texts anticipate and participate in
a continuing dialogue with, and deconstruction of, the Enlightenment suppositions of his own
anarchism.
This questioning leads to a conception of anarchy in Godwin that comes to mean
something quite different from ―anarchism.‖ Anarchy, rather, designates something closer to
its root sense in the term anarchē, an existence without archē: principle or origin. Anarchē
less names a political ideology so much as a ―negativity‖ in the heart of archē that refuses
any sanctioning of things as they are, embracing an idea of history and subjectivity
predicated on contingency. The anarchē evidenced within Godwin‘s corpus unworks the
possibility of any rational politics from within, showing rationality itself to be interminably
afflicted by its own ―groundlessness.‖ In this respect, Godwin can be read alongside a
broader shift in the history of ideas, beginning in romanticism, which traces a growing
skepticism towards the emancipatory projects of Enlightenment. One of the tributary aims of
this study is therefore to make a case for Godwin as a romantic writer, if by ―romantic‖ we
refer to a ―literature involved in the restless process of self-examination‖ (Rajan, Dark
Interpreter 25). By examining this ―restless process‖ in several of Godwin‘s works, this
study contributes both to the fields of contemporary anarchist theory as well as romantic
studies by extending a conceptual bridge between the political and literary histories of ideas
in which Godwin himself participates, but is often marginalized.
iii
Keywords
Godwin, William; Anarchism; Romanticism; Deconstruction; Enlightenment; PostStructuralism; Post-Anarchism; Hume, David; Deleuze, Gilles; Derrida, Jacques
iv
Acknowledgments
This work would simply not have been possible without the support, guidance,
understanding, and especially, the patience of my supervisor Dr. Tilottama Rajan. To say that
Dr. Rajan has had a profound impact on my own thought would be an understatement: her
intellectual rigor and sophistication has been nothing short of inspiring. Dr. Joel Faflak must
also be recognized, whose advice and warm encouragement over the years has been
invaluable for the completion of this project. I would also like to express my gratitude to the
prior and current directors of the Centre for Theory and Criticism at the University of
Western Ontario, Dr. Calin Mihailescu and Dr. Veronica Schild, for allowing me to be part
of such a stimulating and unique intellectual environment. I also acknowledge the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship for helping
fund this project.
I am forever indebted to those professional colleagues, friends, and family whose
understanding and kindness I can never hope to adequately repay: Dr. Lynn Wells, Dr. Peter
Schwenger, Matthew Austin, Jason Dockstader, Matthew Sang, the Romanticism at Western
Reading and Research Group (Joshua Lambier, Christopher Bundock, and Naquaa Abbas),
my parents Lorie and Mick, my brother Luke, and my sister Kara. Finally: this, and my love,
are and always will be for my partner Shannon.
An earlier version of Chapter 4 was published in CLIO 39.3 (2009): 269-92.
v
Table of Contents
CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION ........................................................................... ii
Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii
Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... v
Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... vi
List of Abbreviations ...................................................................................................... viii
Chapter 1 ............................................................................................................................. 1
1 From Anarchism to Anarchē: Reconsidering William Godwin‘s Anarchism .............. 1
1.1 Classical Anarchism and/as Pragmatic Anthropology............................................ 6
1.2 From Post-Anarchism to Anarchē: ....................................................................... 13
1.3 Chapter Outline ..................................................................................................... 26
Chapter 2 ........................................................................................................................... 31
2 ―So Variable and Inconstant a System‖: the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice ... 31
2.1 Arrested Development: Epistemology and Institution .......................................... 36
2.2 The Anarchē of Perfectibility………………...…………………………………..43
2.3 Perfectibility and/as Potentiality ........................................................................... 51
Chapter 3 ........................................................................................................................... 60
3 The History of an Error we Call Truth: Caleb Williams .............................................. 60
3.1 The (Im)Pure Principles of Ancient Gallantry ...................................................... 65
3.2 A Fatal Impulse ..................................................................................................... 76
3.3 Split-Ends: From Defeatism to ―Responsible‖ Anarchy ...................................... 86
Chapter 4 ........................................................................................................................... 93
4 ―The Falsehood of History and the Truth of Romance‖: ―Of History and Romance‖ 93
4.1 General History, or, Nothing is New Under the Sun ............................................ 98
vi
4.2 Individual History, or, Nothing is Old Under the Sun ........................................ 103
4.3 Between Individual History and Romance ......................................................... 114
Chapter 5 ......................................................................................................................... 120
5 Gambling, Alchemy, and Anarchy in St. Leon ......................................................... 120
5.1 Just Gaming: Gambling as Simulacrum.............................................................. 127
5.2 Archē-Oikos: The Domestic Affections ............................................................... 136
5.3 Reverse Transmutations: Alchemy and ―Anarchy‖ ............................................. 143
5.4 ―The World is Open‖: Alchemy and Anarchē ..................................................... 150
Chapter 6………………………………………………………………………………..156
6 ―Not Competent to Exercise those Rights‖: Mandeville ............................................ 156
6.1 Armed Neutrality ................................................................................................ 161
6.2 Individual History as Institutional Typology: Audley, Hilkiah .......................... 167
6.3 Sympathy, Antipathy, and Eternal War .............................................................. 180
6.4 ―An Inferior Race for All Eternity‖ ..................................................................... 195
Chapter 7………………………………………………………………………………..202
7 (In)Conclusion: Towards a Theory of Romantic Anarchism ..................................... 202
Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 213
Curriculum Vitae ............................................................................................................ 233
vii
List of Abbreviations
Works by William Godwin
CW – Things as they Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams. Ed. Gary Handwerk and A.A.
Markley. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000.
―HR‖ – ―Of History and Romance‖ in Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are. Ed.
Gary Handwerk and A.A. Markley. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000. 453-67.
Mand. – Mandeville, a tale of the seventeenth century in England. Ed. Pamela Clemit. The
Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin. Vol. 6. Ed. Mark Philp.
London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992. Print. 8 vols.
PJ – Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and
Happiness. All citations refer to the three-volume facsimile edition of 1798, edited by
F.E.L. Priestley (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1946). References are indicated by
volume, followed by page number.
St.L – St. Leon, a tale of the sixteenth century. Ed. William D. Brewer. Peterborough, ON:
Broadview, 2006.
viii
1
Chapter 1
1
From Anarchism to Anarchē: Reconsidering William
Godwin’s Anarchism
Humanity has no foundation and no ends, it is the definition of groundlessness.
- Costas Douzinas, ―The End(s) of Human Rights‖
Anarchy is, and always has been, a romance.
-Alan Moore, Interview
―The meaning ordinarily attached to the term anarchy,‖ according to Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, ―is absence of principle, absence of rule, consequently it has been regarded as
synonymous with disorder.‖ Yet ―anarchy – the absence of a master, of a sovereign,‖
Proudhon continues, ―is the form of government to which we are every day
approximating. . . . Just as the right of force and the right of artifice retreat before the
steady advance of justice, and must finally be extinguished in equality, so the sovereignty
of the will yields to the sovereignty of reason. . . . As man seeks justice in equality, so
society seeks order in anarchy‖ (277, 277 n1). Proudhon‘s definition points to how the
ideals associated with the anarchist movement are closely interwoven with a postEnlightenment belief in history as the progressive unfolding of the ―sovereignty of
reason‖ as the means to the dissolution of all forms of instituted power. As the absence of
a master, anarchy becomes the sociopolitical paradigm connected with a belief in
humanity‘s inherent capacity to overcome the arbitrariness of power and to remake
society according to axiomatic principles of ―justice‖ and ―equality.‖ As George
Woodcock comments, such a paradigm ―springs from the belief that anarchism is a
manifestation of natural human urges, and that it is the tendency to create authoritarian
institutions which is the transient aberration‖ (Anarchism 35).
Implicit in this classical representation of anarchism, however, is a paradox that
goes deeper than Proudhon‘s half-ironic remark that ―society seeks order in anarchy.‖
Anarchism reverses the normative binary of order and disorder to reveal that anarchy is in
fact the ―true‖ order of society obscured by the artificiality of institutions. Yet, this
reversal also leaves the hierarchical structure of the binary intact by reasserting a
2
foundation or essence to the social. If, as nineteenth century American anarchist
Benjamin Tucker points out, anarchy ―does not mean simply opposed to the archos, or
political leader‖ but ―opposed to archē, . . . beginning, origin‖ or first principle, then the
very definition of anarchy must immanently resist its own claim to represent a
foundational, ―natural‖ or ―sovereign‖ rationality that would constitute the true essence of
the social (qtd. in Weir 11). Indeed, the very definition of archē is always already riven
by contradiction. As Paul de Man remarks in his discussion of the related German term
entstehen – to ―originate‖ or to ―spring forth‖ – ―we can understand origin only in terms
of difference: the source springs up because of the need to be somewhere or something
else than what is now here. The word ‗entstehen,‘ with its distancing prefix, equates
origin with negation and difference‖ (Rhetoric 4). The archē or origin is never properly
original, but is only in relation to what it is not: that is to say, archē is always already in
some way an-archic, the privative an- becoming the ―distancing prefix‖ that makes
visible the aporetic, self-dividing structure at the heart of the supposed simplicity and
purity of origins. In this sense, there can be no anarchism ―as such,‖ since this would be
to attribute an essence to that which is, by definition, the displacement of all essences.
With such paradoxes in mind, this study explores the role of ―anarchy‖ in several
philosophical and literary works by its historical progenitor, William Godwin. Beginning
with Peter Kropotkin‘s landmark entry for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica (1910), historical and critical consensus1 suggests that the modern
sociopolitical theory of anarchism finds its first systematic expression in Godwin‘s
Enlightenment philosophy. Yet, according to Woodcock, Godwin‘s place in anarchism‘s
historical development has always been tinged with uncertainty: like ―Tolstoy or
[existential anarchist Max] Stirner,‖ Godwin stands somewhat ―outside the historical
anarchist movement of the nineteenth century.‖ But Woodcock immediately closes off
the radical potential in associating Godwin‘s rationalism with Stirner‘s existentialism,
pointing out instead that Godwin‘s politics displays such affinities with nineteenth-
1
See Rocker (1938); Woodcock (1962); Marshall (1984) and (1992); Crowder (1991); Clark (1977); and
most recently, Goodway (2006).
3
century anarchism that it is ultimately legitimate to acknowledge his place ―at the head‖
of anarchism‘s ―family tree‖ (Anarchism 54-5).
Although Woodcock argues that Godwin‘s ambiguous status vis-à-vis classical
theories of anarchism has more to do with a lack of acknowledged influence than with
conceptual differences, his suggestion invites further reflection on the manner that
Godwin relates to this tradition. The main argument in what follows is that a closer
analysis of both Godwin‘s philosophy and his literary texts reveals a ―margin‖ more
substantive than simple neglect; rather, this study argues that in Godwin one can already
perceive a revision and questioning of the major assumptions of an anarchism that is still
in the process of being invented. In methodological terms, this questioning can be called
deconstructive, insofar as Godwin‘s oeuvre consists of an ongoing dialogue between
philosophy and literature that combines the political with an epistemology that ungrounds
any rational politics, disclosing the anarchē within his more overt claims for an
anarchism grounded in an autonomous, rational, or natural archē.
In this respect, this study proceeds from the argument that both Godwin‘s
philosophy and his fiction anticipate recent theorists of anarchism such as Reiner
Schürmann, Todd May, Saul Newman, and Lewis Call.2 Despite their differing
approaches and conclusions, each of these theorists aims to incorporate ―the moral
principles of anarchism with the poststructuralist critique of essentialism‖ and thus
theorize ―the possibility of political resistance without essentialist guarantees‖ (Newman
158-9). Such developments in contemporary theory open hitherto unexplored possibilities
for rereading Godwin‘s anarchism. Nonetheless, and I will return to this point, poststructuralist approaches to anarchism also miss a certain potential in reading Godwin
otherwise by failing to reread these more deconstructive3 possibilities back into the
2
Schürmann (1990); May (1994); Newman (2001); Call (2002).
The subtle shift in terminology between post-structuralism and deconstruction is deliberate and will be
taken up in more detail further on in the chapter. At this point, it suffices to say that critics such as
Tilottama Rajan have made convincing cases that the two terms are not exactly synonymous.
Deconstruction has its roots not only in structural linguistics but also in the philosophical tradition of
Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology, whereas what is termed post-structuralism often defines
itself as an ―emancipatory overturning of structuralism‖ largely ―unconcerned with phenomenological
issues‖ (Rajan, Deconstruction 35-6). That contemporary re-appraisals of anarchism have defined
3
4
history of classical anarchism itself, thus betraying a certain presentism in postanarchism‘s claims to represent a more sophisticated, self-aware version of anarchist
politics.
An attempt to trace this figure of anarchē within Godwin‘s philosophical and
literary works will be elaborated in the chapters that follow. At this juncture, it is first
necessary to outline several crucial ideas from which this study proceeds. In particular, I
want to distinguish between three positions: classical anarchism, post-structuralist
anarchism or ―post-anarchism,‖ and the more skeptical, deconstructive approach that I
see as closer to the central insights of Godwin‘s corpus. Such insights, I argue, anticipate
certain aspects of post-anarchism insofar as Godwin‘s work remains skeptical towards
the residual essentialism that persists within classical versions of anarchism. What my
own approach seeks to avoid, however, is post-anarchism‘s tendency to simplify prior
―anarchisms‖ by seeing them as incapable of responding to the problems created or
intimated by their own discourse. To the contrary, certain works by Godwin show him
already engaged in a process of self-questioning irreducible to the essentialist view of
classical anarchism, a self-awareness thus far neglected by post-anarchist theoreticians.
At stake in this reconsideration of Godwin‘s anarchism is a rethinking of the
(inter-)disciplinary relations between Godwin and the history of classical anarchism, as
well as the literary and political aspects within his own oeuvre. My argument is not
simply that Godwin ought to be reincorporated as a central, rather than marginal, figure
in the history of classical anarchism, but that certain works in Godwin‘s corpus anticipate
and contribute to the ongoing process of rethinking anarchism taken up by post-anarchist
theorists. Developments in post-structural theory and its critique of classical versions of
political anarchism allow us to (re)read the process by which, at certain points in his
career, Godwin can be shown to be actively revising the very aims and limits of anarchist
themselves as ―post-anarchist‖ implies an identification with post-structuralism rather than deconstruction,
though deconstruction is often deployed by post-anarchist theorists as though it were identical with poststructuralism.
5
politics. In this sense, it is an oversimplification to hypostasize Godwin‘s role as a
foundational thinker for the anarchists of the nineteenth century who are, in turn,
succeeded by contemporary post-anarchism.
Secondly, reevaluating Godwin‘s relation to the history of anarchism entails an
analogous reevaluation of the connection between the political and literary aspects of his
corpus. Critics often interpret this relationship in one of two ways. On one hand, earlier
critics often understood the literature as a relatively straightforward translation of
Godwin‘s political theory, or a mild qualification of that theory, that keeps its central
assumptions intact. On the other hand, more recent critics – Rudolf Storch, Jerrold E.
Hogle, David Collings, and John Bender, to name but a few – argue that Godwin‘s
literary texts radically undermine his political ideals by exposing the often pathological
subtext of his commitment to pure reason. Both of these approaches, however, appear to
close off the possibility for a productive tension in which the literary complicates the
political by rendering the latter something that remains to be worked-through, rather than
mimetically re-presented or hysterically dismantled. Undoubtedly, Godwin understands
the role of the novel as offering a position from which he can articulate political ideas
otherwise precluded by institutional authority. At the same time, passing from the
political/philosophical to the fictional also forces Godwin to reconsider his philosophy
within a literary framework that implicitly raises the question of the very connection
between politics and literature. As Jacques Derrida avers, the ―possibility of literature‖ is
a distinctively an-archic possibility: ―the possibility of literature, the legitimation that a
society gives it, the allaying of suspicion or terror with regard to it, all that goes together
– politically – with the unlimited right to ask any question, to suspect all dogmatism, to
analyze every presupposition,‖ even those that it would offer as ―true‖ alternatives (On
the Name 28).
This more ―textual,‖ deconstructive anarchism at once provides a literary
framework for Godwin‘s more explicitly stated desires for an unlimited questioning of all
forms of institution. Yet, because this questioning is unlimited, it is also necessarily a
self-questioning that generates a reflexivity within Godwin‘s corpus that traces a path
between Enlightenment and its deconstruction. Godwin‘s novels can be read as
6
potentiating complexities that already begin to surface, if only tentatively, in the more
affirmative or utopian claims of his political philosophy. In this respect, I read Godwin,
to borrow Thomas Pfau‘s terms, as ―skeptical in an essential, rather than merely
occasional or topical, sense‖ (―Beyond Liberal Utopia‖ 84). One must account for the
persistence of a utopian impulse within an anarchism that simultaneously moves towards
skepticism and, as such, can no longer confirm utopia as the telos of a rational politics.
Instead, certain works within Godwin‘s oeuvre demonstrate a persistent dialectic in
which the utopianism of his political commitments prevents his emerging skepticism
from completely taking over, while the novels themselves skeptically expose this
utopianism to its own an-archic groundlessness.
With such issues in mind, the rest of this introduction is dedicated to sketching the
assumptions within classical discourses of anarchism that count Godwin as their
canonical forefather, the post-structuralist response to and critique of these assumptions,
and the lineaments associated with the notion of anarchē that will provide the theoretical
underpinnings of my own approach to Godwin. With these theoretical issues in place, I
then unfold the narrative logic of the chapters that make up the analysis of Godwin that
follows.
1.1 Classical Anarchism and/as Pragmatic Anthropology
Godwin‘s philosophy has been long understood as providing the roots of modern
anarchism. In his entry for the Encyclopedia Britannica, Kropotkin writes that although
Godwin did not give the name ―anarchism‖ to the ―ideas developed in his remarkable
work,‖ he was the first to formulate what would become anarchism‘s fundamental
―political and economical conceptions,‖ conceptions that would be more fully elaborated
in the nineteenth century by anarchist thinkers such as Mikhail Bakunin, Proudhon, and
Kropotkin himself. The ―remarkable work‖ to which Kropotkin refers is Godwin‘s
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, first
published in 1793 and revised in two expanded editions of 1796 and 1798. Although
Godwin is often relegated to minor status within the history of political thought, William
Hazlitt observed in the Spirit of the Age that ―no work in our time gave such a blow to the
7
philosophical mind of the country as the celebrated Enquiry concerning Political Justice‖
(20).
The object of Political Justice is a systematic critique of any and every possible
form of coercion by ―positive institutions‖ that would interfere with ―the peculiar and
independent operation of [an] individual‖‘s rational judgment and its use for the ―general
benefit‖ to society as a whole (PJ 1:1). In this respect, Godwin exemplifies the optimism
of an ―enlightened‖ humanism which posits that ―reason is the only legislator, and her
decrees are irrevocable and uniform.‖ Any such institution that would mediate between
the good of society and the authority of one‘s own ―immutable reason‖ is a form of
coercion only masquerading as justice (1:156). As Collings remarks, Godwin‘s
philosophy seeks not only to challenge ―the rule of law or of government,‖ but also to
effectively repudiate ―rhetorical power, prejudice, custom, contracts, promises,
cooperative action, gratitude, codes of manners, marriage, the subordination of child to
parent, employment of one person by another, and internalized forms of external
constraint, as well as the coercion involved in any revolutionary or collective attempt to
overturn institutions‖ (―The Romance of the Impossible‖ 848).
Godwin‘s attempt at a total critique of institutions is supplemented by a quasimillenarian belief that man and society are naturally progressive and rationally
―perfectible.‖ Although couched in the language of Enlightenment, perfectibility
exercises considerable influence on early romantic writers such as William Wordsworth,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, as well as Godwin‘s son-in-law Percy
Shelley.4 This influence aligns with an emerging romanticism that sees the discourse of
perfectibility shift from rationality to the aesthetic, which, in more conventional
interpretations of romanticism offered by critics such as M.H. Abrams, becomes the
medium through which a natural innocence overcomes the corruptions of experience and
procures the coincidence of mind and nature.5 Residues of this shift are evident in
Kropotkin‘s definition of anarchism in the Encyclopedia, which synthesizes Godwin‘s
4
For a discussion of Coleridge and Southey‘s failed attempt at creating a utopian community based on
Godwinian principles see Fulford (2006), 120-40.
5
See especially, Abrams (1971).
8
Enlightenment optimism with a post-romantic organicism: ―anarchism is a principle or
theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government. . . .
Such a society would represent nothing immutable. On the contrary – as is seen in
organic life at large – harmony would (it is contended) result from an ever-changing
adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitudes of forces.‖6
Similarly, Bakunin defines anarchism as ―a natural, organic, popular force‖ that
diagrammatically opposes the externalized ―artificial authority‖ of ―pneumatic machines
called governments‖ (Political Philosophy 212). The organicist metaphors permeating the
classical anarchist vision of society aligns with a post-romantic idealism that aims to
restore the existence of a natural and harmonious Gemeinschaft over an artificial,
alienated Gesellschaft.
However, recent theorists of anarchism such as Schürmann, Newman, May, and
Call have argued that classical anarchism‘s vision of the social as an organic harmony
constitutes its most conservative rather than radical dimension, even as a political
philosophy that emerges at the threshold of modernism‘s more unsettling vision of
anarchy as radical historical discontinuity.7 As Schürmann argues, what the classical
anarchists ―sought was . . . to substitute the ‗rational‘ power, principium, for the power of
authority, princeps - as metaphysical an operation has ever been. They replace one focus
with another‖ (Heidegger 6). Classical anarchism, according to these critics, does not
effectively break from the metaphysical presuppositions that legitimized past
authoritarian conceptions of power; rather, classical anarchism restates this authority by
substituting it with a ―rational power‖ that extends from the optimistic humanism of
Enlightenment to the aesthetic idealism of organicist rhetoric. It is this inherent
―metaphysical operation‖ that Newman characterizes as classical anarchism‘s insistence
on an ―uncontaminated point of departure,‖ a certain notion of human essence derived
6
Proudhon emphasizes a similar notion in his utopian conception of anarchist society as ―mutualism.‖
Mutualism is predicated on the ostensible existence of ―natural groups‖ in which people ―create among
themselves neighbourly feelings and relations. . . . This group then takes on the form of a community . . .
affirming in its unity its independence‖ (qtd. in Weir 24).
7
In his 1923 essay on Joyce‘s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot defines the task of modernist literature in finding ways of
―giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary
history‖ (Selected Prose 177).
9
from an Enlightenment-humanist framework first articulated in the1793 version of
Godwin‘s Political Justice, a framework that asserts an ―innate morality and rationality
of man‖ against the ―inherently irrational and immoral‖ power of institutions (Newman
39). Classical theories of anarchism from Godwin to Kropotkin make extensive use of a
simplified binary logic that opposes the innately ―good‖ human subject as an
uncontaminated point of departure against the ―irrational‖ and artificial authority of the
state. As Paul Feyerabend argues, such binaries remain tethered to a naïve postEnlightenment belief that ―the established order must be destroyed so that human
spontaneity may come to the fore and exercise its right of freely initiating action,‖
exemplifying an ―almost childlike trust‖ in the ―‗natural reason‘ of the human race‖ (―On
Epistemological Anarchism‖).
Classical anarchism sees power as an external, irrational contaminant that inhibits
or perverts the realization of a natural society fused into a common, organic substance.
Consequently, while anarchism in general emphatically rejects republican and liberal
political philosophies that focus on the self-interested individual, property rights, and
representative democracy,8 it nonetheless remains within the horizon of what Immanuel
Kant had earlier defined as ―anthropology from a pragmatic point of view,‖ which
focuses on what man ―as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of
himself‖ and takes the ―human being‖ as ―his own final end‖ (Anthropology 3-4).9 Thus,
in his seminal anarchist text God and the State (1871, published posthumously in 1882),
Bakunin invokes the discoveries of ―modern science‖ to reproduce a modified,
anthropologically-oriented, and obliquely Hegelian conception of evolution as the index
of ―progressive action in history‖:
The social world, properly speaking, the human world – in short, humanity – is
nothing other than the last and supreme development – at least on our planet and
8
Proudhon states that anarchists cannot be called Republicans, since res publica merely refers to an interest
in public affairs. In this sense, ―even kings are republicans‖ (qtd. in Woodcock, Anarchism 13).
9
Pragmatic anthropology, Kant argues, is distinguished from what he calls ―physiological‖ anthropology.
Where pragmatic anthropology is concerned with what ―man‖ as a freely acting being makes of himself,
physiological anthropology deals only with what ―nature makes of man‖ (3). To put it simply, the
distinction corresponds to the cognitive distinction between transcendental and empirical knowledge and, in
the practical realm, the distinction between freedom and necessity.
10
as far as we know – the highest manifestation of animality. But as every
development necessarily implies a negation, that of its base or point of departure,
humanity is at the same time and essentially the deliberate and gradual negation
of the animal element in man; and it is precisely this negation, as rational as it is
natural, and rational only because natural – at once historical and logical, as
inevitable as the development and realization of all the natural laws in the world.
(8-9)
Despite persistent references to Darwin, Bakunin‘s conflation of nature, history, reason,
and logic is less materialistic than demonstrative of what Slavoj izek calls a thoroughly
ideological ―evolutionary idealism‖: ―the ideology of evolutionism always implies a
belief in a Supreme Good, in a final Goal of evolution which guides its course from the
very beginning. In other words, it always implies a hidden, disavowed teleology‖
(Sublime Object 161). Extending Godwin‘s idea of human perfectibility, Bakunin sees
this historical evolution towards anarchism‘s ―grand truth‖ as fallow but assured, a
realization of nature‘s own laws in the form of the anthropos that belatedly renders
history transparent to itself. Despite sympathy for the Miltonic Satan as read by William
Blake, ―the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds,‖ Bakunin
capitulates to a Feuerbachian anthropology that finally seeks ―God in man, in human
freedom‖ (God and the State 22).10 Anarchism thus bases its revolutionary identity on
high claims for anthropology as the evolutionary guarantor of a natural, moral, social
foundation of human rationality against its corruption by institutions and state power,
simultaneously protecting itself from charges of promoting ―anarchy‖ in the sense of
social disorder.11 In this respect, Newman remarks that the theory of classical anarchism
remains ―the story of man: his evolution from an animal-like state to a state of freedom
and enlightenment, of a rational and ethical existence‖ (37-8).
10
The latter is quoted in Pyziur (1968). The quotation in full reads, ―You are mistaken if you think that I do
not believe in God . . . I seek God in man, in human freedom, and now I seek God in revolution‖ (50-1).
11
Kropotkin, for example, argues that such benevolent natural laws ―are not extrinsic in relation to us, they
are inherent in us, they constitute our nature, our whole being physically, intellectually, and morally,‖ while
Bakunin avers that ―the idea of justice and good, like all other human things, must have their root in man‘s
very animality‖ (Kropotkin, The State 12; Bakunin, Political Philosophy 84).
11
Godwin‘s canonical place at the head of this anarchist tradition ostensibly situates
him at the origin of a strain of pragmatic anthropology that, while opposed to dominative
authority (princeps), nonetheless seeks to reconstitute this power through an
unscrutinized principle of rationality (principium) as human essence, and a vision of
history predicated on a ―disavowed teleology.‖ One of the most extreme examples of this
rational teleology can be found in Godwin‘s penultimate chapter, later Appendix, to
Political Justice titled ―On Health and the Prolongation of Human Life.‖ Obliquely
echoing the speculative fantasy of Bacon‘s New Atlantis (1623), Godwin extends his
overall sense that ―the intellectual state of man, [sic] may be presumed to be in a course
of progressive improvement‖ to the evolutionary possibility that human rationality might
eventually transcend the finite world altogether and enter into a disembodied Platonic
heaven:
let us then, in this place, return to the sublime conjecture of [Benjamin] Franklin .
. . that ‗mind will one day become omnipotent over matter.‘ The sense which he
annexed to this expression, seems to have related to the improvements of human
invention, in relation to machines and the compendium of labour. But, if the
power of intellect can be established over all other matter, are we not inevitably
led to ask, why not over the matter of our own bodies? (2:520, 525)
Deploying the romanticized language of sublimity as coextensive with the telos of
Enlightenment reason – namely, the complete abjection of material content for ideational
form that, as Hazlitt remarks of Godwinian reason, ―gives no quarter to the amiable
weaknesses of our nature‖ (34) – Godwin reenacts a secular version of the metaphysical
polarity that devalues the empirical, the contingent, and the historical in favour of the
evolution of the rational soul: ―we ought to be upon all occasions prepared to render a
reason for our actions. We should remove ourselves to the farthest distance from the state
of mere inanimate machines, acted upon by causes of which they have no understanding‖
(PJ 1:68).
In attempting to extrapolate beings from their finitude, Hazlitt notes that Godwin
―raised the standard of morality above the reach of humanity, and by directing virtue to
12
the most airy and romantic heights, made her path dangerous, solitary, and impracticable.
The author of Political Justice took abstract reason for the rule of conduct, and abstract
good for its end,‖ a point earlier echoed by Wordsworth‘s comment in the 1805 Prelude
that Godwinian philosophy would ―abstract the hopes of man / Out of his feelings, to be
fixed thenceforth / For ever in a purer element‖ (Hazlitt 22; Wordsworth, Prelude X. 8079).12 Through this idea of a ―purer element,‖ Godwin safeguards the teleological efficacy
of moral progress against the existential world that incessantly exposes the self to its
finitude. Following Hazlitt‘s appraisal of Godwinian virtue as ―romantic,‖ early critics
thus perceived Godwin‘s appeal to pure reason as analogous to the aesthetic idealism of
the romantic ―imagination‖ (Pollin, Education 11).
As such, Godwin becomes vulnerable to the criticism that his anarchism provides
yet another example of romanticism‘s tendency towards ―aesthetic ideology.‖13 Although
the materialist orientation often found in later anarchists might suggest that the latter
would reject Godwin‘s insistence on the need to transcend the material altogether,14
classical anarchism‘s vision of the social as a self-regulating, evolutionary, organic whole
is an extension of, rather than a challenge to, the idealism that passes from Godwinian
rationality to the romantic imagination. In any case, Godwin appears to lay the
groundwork for a later anarchism that remains within the horizon of a totalizing
metaphysics that, as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer have argued, develops a
teleology of progress and a notion of the omnipotence of mind over matter that reinscribes the very ―mythological‖ structures it sought to dissolve.15 Ironically, the
discourse of classical anarchism does not appear properly an-archic, insofar as it remains
indebted to a conceptual framework determined by archē, a natural foundation or origin
12
In his short-lived periodical The Watchman (1796), Coleridge expresses similar concerns with Godwin‘s
austere rationalism. Replying to an earlier critic for his dismissal of Political Justice, Coleridge writes that
―[I] am not quite convinced with yourself and Mr. Godwin that mind will be omnipotent over matter, that a
plough will go into the field and perform its labour without the presence of the agriculturist, that may be
immortal in this life‖ (Collected Works 2:197).
13
I use this term in de Man‘s sense of aesthetic objects that posit themselves as ideologically innocent
through a ―confusion of linguistic with natural reality, or reference with phenomenalism [the objects
themselves]‖ (Resistance to Theory 11).
14
See especially Bakunin‘s rejection of idealism for materialism in God and the State, 24-8.
15
See ―The Concept of Enlightenment‖ in Adorno and Horkheimer (1972), 1-34.
13
entirely present to itself and somehow untouched by power and the contingencies of
material existence.
1.2 From Post-Anarchism to Anarchē
Thinkers such as May, Newman, and Call therefore seek to disengage anarchism from its
earlier essentialism by re-conceptualizing anarchistic practices along the lines of poststructuralist theory. Post-structural anarchism does not name a systematically coherent set
of doctrines, but rather calls upon a diverse set of interrelated concepts from thinkers
such as Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze (and Deleuze with Félix
Guattari), Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and
Jacques Lacan. If, as Lyotard famously suggested, postmodernity is defined by
―incredulity towards metanarratives,‖ then post-anarchism bears a similar incredulity
towards the Enlightenment metanarrative that legitimizes classical anarchism as a variant
of pragmatic anthropology (Postmodern Condition xxiv). Call thus locates the overall
aim of post-anarchism as an attempt at recreating the central principles of classical
anarchism in the image of an ―antianthropology‖ that launches a ―full-fledged attack on
the semiotics of political economy and all disciplinary institutions which grow out of‖
humanistic optimism, foreclosing any ―comfortable return to the simpler days of the
Enlightenment, despite the most strenuous liberal arguments to the contrary‖ (35).
However edifying in its recovery of classical anarchism for contemporary theory,
much post-anarchist theory nonetheless remains limited by its tendency to privilege an
affirmative, rather than self-critical, politics of liberation. In this respect, post-anarchism
falls under the rubric of what Tilottama Rajan calls ―affirmative post-structuralism.‖ As
Rajan observes, affirmative post-structuralism employs a ―loose use of poststructuralism
to signify any kind of oppositional criticism,‖ in which anarchism would be transformed
into ―the unscrutinized foundation of ‗oppositional practices.‘‖ Such practices make use
of ―the techniques of deconstruction . . . against systems and structures, but not against
[themselves],‖ allowing certain theorizations of post-anarchism to uncritically recuperate
an ―affirmative‖ discourse of ―vicarious revolutionism.‖ Consequently, post-anarchism
often endangers the potential of its own insights on the limitations of classical anarchism
14
by capitulating to a ―postmodern pragmatic anthropology‖ that allows anarchism to be
safely ―reconfigured as practice or as agency.‖ In this respect, much of post-anarchism
remains deeply invested in a transference of ―philosophy (or literature) into practice‖ that
covertly maintains the ―presentist‖ orientation of pragmatic anthropology (Rajan,
Deconstruction 36-8).
The collapsed distance between theory and practice emphasized by many postanarchists reinstalls the eminence of practice so as to instrumentalize theory, rather than
expand the possible ways of thinking about how theory‘s resistances to the pragmatic can
also be considered anarchic, or the ways in which such a reconsideration of theory
changes our understanding of practice. The pragmatics of post-anarchism has led certain
post-anarchist theoreticians to simply dismiss classical anarchism as ―irrelevant to
today‘s struggles,‖ displaying a presentism with respect to classical anarchist theory that,
as Marjorie Levinson points out in a different context, establishes the contemporary critic
as a ―privileged, essential subject‖ who can ―cure the past of its objectivity‖ (Newman
159; Levinson 29-30). Although providing valuable insights into the limitations of
nineteenth-century anarchism, certain post-anarchists invoke the unwarranted privilege of
a post-1968 theoretical orientation that sees itself as immune to the erroneous
presuppositions of a prior anarchism, whose essentialism forestalls its emancipatory
potential.16
At the same time, a post-anarchist theorist such as Newman appears more
cautious than the more affirmative rhetoric found in May and Call. In particular, Newman
focuses on a more deconstructive approach that does not immediately dismiss the
―emancipative possibilities‖ within classical anarchism, provided that these possibilities
make us aware of the ―humanist foundations which limit it to certain forms of
subjectivity‖ (129). Newman approvingly cites Derrida‘s comment in ―Force of Law‖
16
In this respect, post-anarchism attempts something of a repetition of the revolutionary praxis of
―propaganda by the deed‖ popularized by late nineteenth- early twentieth-century anarchists, albeit without
the latter‘s terrorism. Call christens May ‗68 the ―birth of a Postmodern Anarchist Praxis‖ (99). Similarly,
in ―Postanarchism in a Nutshell‖ (2003) Jason Adams cites Douglas Kellner in Andrew Feenberg (2001) to
argue that the contemporary revision of anarchism ―ultimately began with the Events of May 1968‖ and
―thus, whether it is fully self-conscious of this fact or not, it is ultimately against this background that
‗postanarchism‘ has recently emerged.‖
15
that ―nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal, we cannot
attempt to disqualify it today. . . . But beyond these identified territories . . . other areas
must constantly open up that at first seem like secondary or marginal areas‖ (Derrida 28).
In light of the limitations of certain aspects of post-anarchist theory, Jesse S. Cohn
similarly argues that the question becomes ―whether the anarchist tradition [itself] is
liable to the anti-essentialist critique leveled at it by its would-be post-structuralist
rescuers‖ (56). Cohn‘s own approach sets out to argue for revisiting several major figures
within the anarchist tradition as complex thinkers in their own right, while
simultaneously arguing that ―anarchist interpretive practices can and should appropriate
the techniques and insights of other schools, from psychoanalysis and semiotics to
dialogism and deconstruction. . . . It ought to do so without also borrowing their
restrictions, their constraints, their limitations. This means that we should appropriate
technique in a critical manner, avoiding a careless eclecticism‖ (97).
Curiously, throughout these various revisions and reinterpretations of anarchism,
Godwin himself still occupies the outlying margins that Woodcock had already perceived
with respect to classical anarchism‘s family resemblances. With the exception of a brief
mention by Newman,17 none of the post-anarchist studies cited above substantially revisit
Godwin‘s anarchism, which is to say that post-anarchist discourse has not yet
encountered Godwin beyond what Derrida might call the ―identified territories‖ of his
thinking. What is offered in this study is, in part, a further extension of post-anarchism‘s
deconstruction of the official discourse of classical anarchism. More specifically, my
argument proceeds from a sense that the post-anarchist deconstruction of classical
anarchism can already be found in Godwin himself. Moreover, it is Godwin‘s distinctive
use of literature that opens a space that allows him to revise and question his own utopian
rhetoric. Anarchism did not have to wait for post-anarchism to become aware of the
limitations within its own discourse; rather, it is already in Godwin that anarchism is
shown to be a deeply unsettled project that places its own logocentric and anthropological
17
Newman mentions Godwin‘s emphasis on ―universal benevolence‖ as a precursor to Kropotkin‘s idea of
a society based on ―mutual aid‖ (41-2). ―Mutual aid‖ refers to a society based on the cultivation of a natural
―social instinct‖ towards cooperation and mutual assistance. See Kropotkin (1972).
16
assumptions in doubt. In what follows then, I admit the critical value of the postanarchist resistance to classical anarchism, without subscribing to the affirmative
celebration of revolutionary jouissance that such views recommend. Godwin‘s
anarchism, to the contrary, remains skeptical rather than affirmative, and therefore cannot
simply be described as either Enlightenment or post-anarchist anthropology.
One can already glimpse the ambivalences that Godwin will explore to more
radical effect in his novels in his decision to move ―On Health and the Prolongation of
Human Life‖ to an Appendix for the 1798 edition of Political Justice. In deferring what
would logically have been the final chapter of the 1793 edition, Godwin seems to
acknowledge implicit doubts as to whether his hopeful image of a purely disembodied
rational subject culminates in the myth of its own (im)possibility. The very form of an
Appendix lends itself to such ambiguities, since the function of an Appendix is to
envelop a content whose supplemental status makes it at once internal and external with
respect to the text to which it is appended. By choosing to include his speculations in the
form of a supplement to the text, Godwin tries to preserve the illusion of perfectibility‘s
realization at the very moment that he skeptically concedes its insubstantiality as mere
―speculation.‖ As if trying to contain an implicit recognition that the goal of perfectibility
is at best hopeful and, at worst, a mythology of progress that actually undermines the
more concrete aims of Political Justice, Godwin assures his reader both at the beginning
and the end of the Appendix that its content ―must be considered, as eminently a
deviation into the land of conjecture. If it be false, it leaves the system to which it is
appended, in all sound reason, as impregnable as ever‖; ―before we dismiss this subject it
is proper once again to remind the reader, that the substance of this Appendix is given
only as a matter of probable conjecture, and that the leading argument of this division of
the work is altogether independent of its truth or falsehood‖ (2:519, 529). Indefinitely
postponed into the future and protected from critical scrutiny in the present, Godwin
sustains his idealistic hope for a New Atlantis in seeing it as probable, if not guaranteed.
But in relegating the accomplishment of political justice to ―mere‖ speculation,
Godwin reveals a deeper awareness that his vision of a pure reason liberated from the
material world may be nothing more than an invention of consciousness, rather than the
17
final end of an immanent law of human progress embedded in actual history. Both the
form and the content of the Appendix gesture towards a tacit uncertainty as to the
viability of an anarchism deduced from pure reason, whose speculative status opens a
lacuna between its stated theoretical aims and the practical realization of these aims. At
the same time, this lacuna suggests a potentiality for thinking that forbids closure,
opening a future dimension that persists despite the fact that it can no longer be
guaranteed. Speculation remains a supplement that is always in excess of what can be
posited, suggesting an incompletion and an anxiety that disturbs both rational and
institutional forms of self-presence, what Godwin identifies in his late essay collection
Thoughts on Man (1831) as a ―rebelliousness‖ within human nature that compels us ―to
launch into the wide sea of possibilities, and to nourish [our] thoughts with observing a
train of unforeseen consequences as they arise,‖ so as to challenge the ―wearied . . .
repetition of rotatory acts and every-day occurrences‖ (97).
What has been lost in contemporary post-anarchist criticism is recognition of the
ways in which Godwin‘s career already constitutes ―an important transition away from
the rational and systematic mode of his philosophical writing and its totalizing aspirations
and toward a new, radical paradigm of literature.‖ This literary paradigm effectively
signals ―the collapse of self-consciousness and intentionality as the Archimedean point
for a coherent and comprehensive social theory‖ (Pfau, Romantic Moods 115). The sense
that literature becomes a site for the corrosion of the Enlightenment tropes of reason,
progress, individual autonomy, and transparent selfhood often assumed to guide
Godwin‘s corpus is at odds with the approaches taken by earlier critics. The latter often
situate Godwin‘s fictions as extensions of, rather than challenges to, the overt
assumptions of his political philosophy.18 Although some critics, like Angus Wilson and
18
Godwin himself provides some justification for these interpretations, suggesting in the preface to his first
novel Caleb Williams (1794) that literature functions primarily as a ―vehicle‖ for political ideas: ―what is
now presented to the public is no refined and abstract speculation: it is a study and delineation of things
passing in the moral world. It is but of late that the inestimable importance of political principles has been
adequately apprehended. . . . But it is a truth highly worth to be communicated to persons whom books of
philosophy and science are never likely to reach‖ (CW 55). Following Godwin‘s prompt, early interpreters
H.N. Brailsford, D.H. Monro, Woodcock, and Mitzi Myers argue that Godwin‘s fictions remain optimistic
and politically progressive. For Brailsford, Caleb Williams ―conveys in the form of an eventful personal
history the essence of the criticism against society, which had inspired Political Justice,‖ while Woodcock
locates the ―principal theme‖ in Godwin‘s fiction in his depictions of the unjust ways that political
18
B.J. Tysdahl, are willing to admit some form of ―ambiguity‖ into their discussions of
Godwin‘s fiction, these ambiguities are often recuperated within an overall philosophical
framework whose unity is enabled rather than threatened by the presence of
contradiction.19 Consequently, earlier criticism does not see the ambiguities that surface
within Godwin‘s fiction as calling the principles of classical anarchism into question.
While it is undeniable that Godwin writes his fictions with an eye to expressing
his political ideas, it is distinctive that his writings appear more thematically interested in
unsettling such ideas, whether through pathological or untrustworthy narrators, or plot
structures that foreground the contingency of events over rational progression. Thus, in a
move similar to post-anarchism‘s shift in perspective concerning classical anarchism,
recent literary criticism has begun to acknowledge a breach between argument and
narrative in Godwin‘s oeuvre that challenges earlier interpretations and, by extension, the
conventional presuppositions of his status as a classical anarchist. As Handwerk remarks,
the thrust of Godwin‘s novels is so often ―fundamentally contrary to the explicit political
assumptions and expectations‖ of his moral philosophy that they tend towards ―reopening
the gulf between politics and ethics, between power and justice, that [his] political
institutions ―crush‖ the individual (Brailsford 143; Woodcock 120). Gary Kelly likewise suggests that
Caleb Williams be understood as a ―Jacobin‖ fiction whose aim is to promote resistance to ―tyranny and
oppression, be it domestic, national or international‖ and the ―persecution of individuals‖ in order to
reinforce the idea of history as an allegorical ―account of the efforts of some men to establish the rule of
reason against its enemies . . . error and prejudice‖ (7, 179). Writing of Godwin‘s late decision to revise his
conclusion to his first novel, Myers points out that the author's ―habits of composition and revision, and his
changes from the original version [of the novel] suggest that his vision . . . evolved in the course of actual
composition.‖ Such critics do not see Godwin‘s revisionary approach to the novel as upsetting the
trajectory of his classical anarchism. Rather, Myers suggests that Godwin‘s revisions in fact ―both complete
the moral pattern developed in the book and underscores the principle of impartiality which is the root of
the moral system elaborated in Political Justice‖ (591).
19
See Wilson (1951), 38. Adapting the New Critical terminology of William Empson (1930) and Wayne C.
Booth (1974), Tysdahl anticipates a more deconstructive potential in Caleb Williams by classifying the
novel as exemplifying a radical type of ambiguity in which ―two entire Weltanshauungen vie in catching
our attention,‖ creating an ―Unstable Irony, as opposed to [a] Stable Irony‖ that would enable ―a reader to
reconstruct one definite meaning‖ (32). However, the unstable irony admitted by critics such as Booth is
harnessed within a typology of rhetorical species and subspecies that classifies it as a ―deviation‖ from, and
thereby governed by, a normative, mediating form of irony that deals with relatively stable, recuperative
meanings. Conversely, deconstructive critics such as de Man argue that irony as such is ―unstable,‖ insofar
as it begins from the recognition that ―the relationship between sign and meaning is discontinuous‖
(Blindness and Insight 209).
19
writings had sought to bridge‖ (―Of Caleb‘s Guilt‖ 940). How one interprets this gap
between political expectation and literary expression – as an irreducible breach or prelude
to affirmation – is crucial in determining Godwin‘s relationship to anarchism and to postanarchism. The breach itself admits a skepticism that reflects a turn from the rationalism
of Godwin‘s early work towards a more skeptical perspective that doubts reason‘s
vaunted capacity to provide definite and self-validating knowledge of the external world.
Indeed, by the third edition of Political Justice, Godwin no longer sees reason as an
―independent principle.‖ More and more influenced by his readings of Hume, Godwin
begins to suggest that reason ―has no tendency to excite us to action; in a practical view,
it is merely a comparison and balancing of different feelings‖ (PJ ―Summary of
Principles‖ VI).20 The inversion by which consciousness becomes a ―calm‖ passion cuts
off the more formalist implications of a rationalism that would exclude the tangled
domain of affect from its moral analyses. Instead, Godwin begins to acknowledge that
reason is not ―archaic,‖ but is rather driven by a complex web of obscure, non-conscious
motivations that persistently threaten to destabilize the axiom of a sovereign, transparent,
and self-possessed consciousness.
Godwin‘s recognition of a non-rational ground of consciousness suggests that
affect cannot be contained within the rational forms that ―regulate‖ it. In his revised
versions of Political Justice and in his essays for the Enquirer (1797), Godwin argues
that the illusion of a self-validating consciousness rests on a radically unstable ground:
―ideas are to the mind nearly what atoms are to the body. The whole mass is in a
perpetual flux; nothing is stable and permanent‖ and subsequently, ―human affairs are so
entangled, motives are so subtle and variously compounded, that the truth cannot be told‖
(PJ 1:35; Enquirer 261). ―Truth‖ in this instance becomes the overdetermined effect of a
tangle of motives whose causes remain obscure, a truth whose very appearance always
bears the trace of its own groundlessness. Although Godwin maintains a certain efficacy
20
In his facsimile edition of the 1798 edition of Political Justice, F.E.L. Priestley notes that Godwin begins
to shift specific terms in his second edition to more adequately reflect a Humean position. Godwin rewrites
all references to ―cause‖ and ―effect,‖ for instance, as ―antecedent‖ and ―consequent,‖ suggesting a
movement away from the influence of the materialist determinism of French philosophes such as
d‘Holbach. See Godwin‘s ―Preface‖ to the first edition of Political Justice.
20
for reason in the form of a regulatory mechanism, his very definition gestures to the
compensatory rather than foundational role of a rational consciousness guided by the
strongest passion, exposing ―the spectre of an Enlightenment subjectivity whose
underlying emotive strata no longer bear any stable or discernible relation to reason‖
(Pfau, Romantic Moods 4). Acknowledging the ways in which Godwin eventually comes
to see reason as the ―mechanism‖ of the passions gestures towards an ambivalence that
cannot be recuperated within an internally consistent sociopolitical program. Rather, as
Pfau avers, Godwin‘s fictions increasingly take the form of a ―rigorous inquiry into the
structure of consciousness and its elusive, indeed chaotic, a priori sources (impulses,
emotions, anxieties, cryptic memories, etc.).‖ The consequence, Pfau continues, is that
Godwin ―renders anarchy less a political objective than the epistemological default‖ (20).
It is precisely this ―default‖ – rather than the explicit ―political objective(s)‖ of
anarchism – that constitutes the major conceptual thread connecting the chapters that
follow. My intention, then, is not to provide a means of bridging Godwin‘s respective
works of philosophy and literature on the basis of a sociopolitical conception of
anarchism. Instead, I argue from the perspective that Godwin‘s changing understanding
of romance over the course of his career produces a dialogical relationship between
philosophy and literature that acknowledges a more radical conception of anarchy as the
a priori condition of the real, a condition that effectively deconstructs what May
identifies as the a priori of classical anarchism: ―humanist naturalism, the concept of a
benign human essence‖ (75). My approach therefore necessitates a different conception
of what is often understood by anarchy, the theorization of which is already partially
signaled by the critical, rather than affirmative, aspects of post-anarchist theory.
Pfau‘s sense that Godwin‘s career gradually moves towards an an-archic a priori
is already counter-intuitive, for it implies a revision of the normative relationship
between anarchy and archē that, since Plato and Aristotle, has largely conceived the latter
as the rational condition for the former.21 Standard definitions of archē reduce anarchy to
21
For a detailed discussion of the history of archē within the Western metaphysical tradition, from Plato
and Aristotle through Duns Scotus, Leibniz, and finally to Heidegger, see Schürmann. For Schürmann, the
21
an adjectival derivative, the mere logical negation of a prior positivity, or the corruption
of a pre-existing order or original plentitude upon which it parasitically depends. To
conceive of anarchy as a priori would therefore be to deprive the original of its status as
an uncontaminated point of departure. To understand the a priori as properly an-archic,
anarchē cannot simply be reconstituted as a foundational principle. As Emmanuel
Lévinas points out, to raise anarchy to the status of a principle is contradictory, and
threatens to re-inscribe the very authority it sought to displace: ―anarchy cannot be
sovereign, like an archē. . . . [Anarchy] does not reign‖ (194 n3, 4). Nor can anarchy be
understood simply as the (logical) negation of archē, a definition that remains
conservative insofar as it ties anarchy‘s existence to a principle already in place. Rather,
to borrow Schürmann‘s formulation, the anarchē at issue in this study names
a history in which the bedrock yields and where it becomes obvious that the principle
of cohesion, be it authoritarian or ―rational,‖ is no more than a blank space deprived
of legislative, normative, power. Anarchy expresses a destiny of decline, the decay of
the standards to which Westerners since Plato have related their acts and deeds in
order to anchor them there and to withdraw them from change and doubt. (7)
Anarchy here refers to a hiatus in which the discursive principle(s) that hitherto organize
a certain historical/social/political culture are no longer experienced as reliable. In this
respect, anarchy well describes the turbulent historical situation in which Godwin‘s
writing career unfolds: first coming to prominence with Political Justice and Caleb
Williams during the French Revolution, Godwin continues to publish throughout the
revolutionary turbulence of the 1790‘s, experiencing a twelve-year gap between his third
and his fourth novels Fleetwood (1805) and Mandeville (1817), finally bringing out a
history of Cromwell (A History of the Commonwealth, 1824-28), his last two novels
(Cloudesley, 1830; Deloraine, 1833), a book of essays (Thoughts on Man, 1831), and a
definition of archē undergoes a metaphorical transference from Greek to Latin that sees it transformed first
into the princeps of Scholasticism, which privileges a static hierarchical order of essences governed by
Divine Prince, and finally reified into the ―anthropologized origin‖ of a principium in the eighteenth
century (116).
22
history of the occult (Lives of the Necromancers, 1834) all during the fractious period of
the European Restoration.
Anarchy might also accurately describe the interregnum more broadly associated
with the romantic period. Implicitly referring to Godwin‘s best-known work, Pfau
comments that romanticism exhibits ―a persistent dialectic between vaunted claims for
spiritual renewal, political justice, and cultural innovation, on the one hand, and a
continual sense of affective and epistemological bewilderment, on the other. . . .
[R]omanticism‘s quest for solutions in the mediated, imaginary sphere of aesthetic
productivity . . . reflects the period‘s conclusion that the languages by which the
Augustans and Enlightenment had sought to make uneven sense of their experiential
worlds were no longer reliable or even trustworthy‖ (Romantic Moods 1-2). The ―blank‖
exposed by anarchy shows history to be governed less by an evolution that sublates error
and discloses a foundational natural or rational law, than constantly interrupted by crises
that dislocate the ideologically managed vision of history as linear and progressive.
Anarchy, in this qualified sense, confronts the historical subject as implicated in
necessities and antagonisms that can neither be predicted nor entirely overcome, while
likewise disclosing a history that is, as Friedrich Schlegel argues of the romantic, ―still
becoming‖ (32). Anarchy is inextricable from the contingent, irruptive force of an event
that retroactively shows the ostensible progress leading up to the present rife with
antagonism, but also from a view of history as essentially incomplete and subject to
contingency. As we shall see with Godwin‘s shifting views concerning his own doctrine
of necessity, the latter loses its intentionality as a historically progressive movement and
begins to signify a force of vicissitude closer to what Percy Shelley calls ―Power‖ in
―Mont Blanc,‖ a force that leads Godwin, in his later revisions to Political Justice, to
explicitly question whether ―improvement has been the constant characteristic of the
universe‖ (PJ 1:452-3).
Anarchy, in Schürmann‘s sense, can also be associated with a broader theoretical
problematic as the erosion of ―the rational production of that anchorage‖ that allows for
a withdrawal from self-questioning (6). Anarchy discloses the contingency behind any
metaphysic that claims a priority of essence or presence. The ―blank space‖ behind
23
institutions is also a theme for Newman‘s post-anarchism, and goes some way to
characterizing the nature and function of the an-archic a priori. For Newman, if anarchy
is to avoid circumscribing itself as a moral or rational human essence, an irrational
nihilism, or an overzealous model for revolutionary ―practice,‖ it can no longer appeal to
―an actual place outside power and discourse from where domination . . . can be
opposed‖ (141). Anarchism remains a form of bad faith insofar as it reveals the
artificiality of institutions only to reassert a more ―natural‖ ground for society in an
unquestioned rational and moral essence. Insofar as anarchy is said to expose a blank
behind institution, it can therefore no longer claim the privilege of a more primary,
archaic, ground. In the same sense, this nothingness cannot simply be reaffirmed as the
―essence‖ of society as in nihilistic versions of anarchy, which seek merely to abolish the
social. Rather, anarchy names ―that which denies society an essence,‖ something that
does not ―seek the founding of a new order, but rather the displacement of all orders –
including its own. . . . [Anarchy] does not reject essence, but rather constructs its essence
as a non-essence‖ (Newman 149, 124). This essence, paradoxically (re)constructed as its
own non-essence, points to the contingent rather than foundational basis of a political
subjectivity or historical culture never completely able to grasp itself.
To understand anarchy as a priori is to see this contingent ―non-essence‖ as
paradoxically constitutive rather than derivative. Anarchy might thus be considered
―older‖ than archē in the same manner that Derrida suggests that writing is older than
speech. ―Older,‖ in this instance, signifies a logical rather than chronological or essential
priority, the priority of a differential ―infrastructure‖ over the self-presence attributed to
metaphysical ideas of archē as a first principle, the original, undivided, and
uncontaminated essence underlying its contingent manifestations. Infrastructure, as
Rodolphe Gasché argues, names a ―preontological‖ figure that cannot be described in
terms of the canonical oppositions (order-disorder, presence-absence, being-nothingness)
that it engenders. As preontological, infrastructure indicates the non-logical condition of
possibility for ―every logical proposition‖: ―infrastructure belongs to a space ‗logically‘
anterior and alien to that of the regulated contradictions of metaphysics‖ (149).
24
The anteriority of the infrastructure signifies the ―open matrix‖ of differences
through which oppositions are engendered, an ―irreducible complexity‖ for which the
metaphysics of archē cannot account in a propositional language structured according to
binary code. It is by ―means of such infrastructures,‖ Gasché remarks, that one might
account ―for the differences that fissure the discourse of philosophy‖ (147). Rather than
discover an uncontaminated human, natural, or social essence prior to institution, an
anarchist hermeneutic must therefore account for this infrastructure, unmasking ―rift
behind closure, discord behind harmony . . . [,] the dark, turgid, struggle of silent forces .
. . precariously held in check by notions such as human essence, morality, rationality, and
natural law‖ (Newman 51). Unmasking archē requires a hermeneutic no longer aimed at
the discovery of an ultimate ground, but rather the disarticulation of any metaphysic that
seeks repose in the original, a hermeneutic not unlike what Foucault identifies with the
Nietzschean concept of genealogy: ―The [genealogical] search for descent is not the
erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered
immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was
imagined consistent with itself‖ (―Nietzsche, Genealogy, History‖ 147).
Anarchy can be called a priori as the preontological infrastructure of
complexities, differences, antagonisms, and disunities ―before‖ to the emergence of a
natural, monological, and uncontaminated point of departure. In its strictly regulated,
Manichean, opposition between the organic life of society and the pneumatic artificiality
of institutions, the sociopolitical discourse of classical anarchism situates itself according
to a propositional-denotative language that claims to represent an essential core of reality
that exists beneath the external, irrational, corruptions of power. To the contrary, Gerald
L. Bruns suggests that a more accurate description of anarchy would name the ―refractory
region excluded by an integral rationality that disposes everything according to the rule
of unity and identity‖ (6). On the hither side of what can be articulated in propositional
language, anarchy reveals the ―unity and identity‖ of archē as an ameliorative
construction through which a historical culture or an individual subjectivity protects itself
from the disclosure of its own groundlessness. According to Bruns, anarchy must
therefore be understood ―not as a position that might or might not be adopted but as a
state of affairs, that is, a fact of the matter that cannot be done away with,‖ what Jean-Luc
25
Nancy analogously calls ―the fact of existence as the essence of itself,‖ a fact that signals
the incessant ―putting into question of an affirmation‖ (Bruns 188; Nancy, The
Experience of Freedom 11, 18).
In order to distinguish this more skeptical, (self-)questioning, conception of
anarchy from both sociopolitical anarchism and blindly destructive nihilism, I follow
Schürmann in using the Greek term anarchē. Terminologically, anarchē has the
advantage of combining archē with the privative an- in such a way that it makes
graphically visible an incompleteness within the structure of archē itself, rather than
suggesting a specific sociopolitical ideology or one half of a simplified antithesis between
order and disorder. At the same time, anarchē makes visible a conception of anarchy that
cannot be reduced to a vicarious notion of freedom beyond all constraint. Soldered to
archē, the privative an- gestures to strategic questioning of archē that more accurately
reflects Godwin‘s historical and ideological positioning as a writer who challenges
Enlightenment rationality from within. Articulated from the point of view of an insistent
questioning of an affirmation, anarchē is not a release from the strictures of tradition into
a completely new, non-repressive, order of existence, but an internal provocation that
exceeds archē by questioning the values that it represents. Anarchē in this sense is not the
negation of archē so much as the interior disturbance, questioning, and illumination of
the aporetic infrastructure proper to archē itself.
This conception of anarchē as the hither side of the propositional language is
disclosed through literary language. Indeed, Godwin‘s career could be said to articulate a
persistent renegotiation of the discontinuous relationships between the genres of
―literature,‖ ―romance,‖ and ―history.‖ Early on, Godwin follows an Enlightenment
definition of literature as a vehicle for social change and thus antithetical to romance,
which is reduced to a form of false consciousness. Near the end of the eighteenth century,
however, Godwin shifts to a more complex understanding of romance and its relationship
to theories of history that had become prominent during the Scottish Enlightenment.
Romance becomes a way of resisting the positivism of the Scottish historiographers and
the means through which Godwin reconnects to a history that is neither strictly factual
nor actuarial but counter-factual, thereby opening a space for individual histories
26
otherwise foreclosed by the generalizing tendencies of historians such as Hume and
William Robertson. But from his very first work of fiction, Godwin also appears to be
aware of the duplicity of a pure reason that can only be articulated through the very
literary language it would condemn as false.
In this respect, Godwin‘s career does not exactly follow a pattern that passes from
a naïve belief in the omnipotence of reason to disillusionment so much as it perpetually
re-stages a negative dialectic between his political/rational idealism and a skeptical
awareness of this idealism as groundless. Such tensions cannot be entirely overcome
through what Godwin calls the gradual ―extirpation of errors.‖ On the contrary, Godwin‘s
emerging sense of the groundlessness of an anarchism predicated on reason is terminal
and can only be reconstituted at the expense of forgetting that reason‘s self-mastery is
illusory. Reason cannot fully recover from an exposure to its own anarchē, since the
latter does not belong to the order of antitheses that reason needs in order to establish
itself as a unity. Literary language, as another site of resistances to assimilation by
propositional discourse, becomes the problematic site upon which Godwin confronts an
anarchē that goes beyond classical political anarchism. As such, a tributary aim of the
work that follows is to make a case for Godwin as a romantic writer, rather than an
Enlightenment rationalist, or, to use Mark Philp‘s terms, a ―sophisticated‖ utilitarian, who
also wrote novels as a means of expressing his sociopolitical views (Godwin‟s Political
Justice 159). Interpreted as a ―romantic anarchist,‖ Godwin can therefore be understood
alongside Rajan‘s definition of romantic literature as ―a literature involved in the restless
process of self-examination, and in search of a model of discourse which accommodates
rather than simplifies its ambivalence‖ (Dark Interpreter 25).
1.3 Chapter Outline
A study of the anarchē within Godwin‘s anarchism cannot properly begin without an
examination of his seminal philosophical work, Political Justice. My second chapter thus
engages with several of the major themes of Political Justice, including Godwin‘s
definitions of perfectibility, institution, necessity, and subjectivity, emphasizing the
conceptual and terminological shifts between Godwin‘s revisions of the text that Pfau
27
describes as eroding of the ―totalizing aspirations‖ of his earlier rationalism. These
transitions feature a revised approach to subjectivity that follows from the increased
influence of Hume‘s displacement of reason as archē. Godwin no longer conceives of
reason as an ―independent principle‖ but re-articulates the self as a groundless, protean
figure in constant flux. To emphasize the radicality of this displacement, I read Godwin‘s
turn towards a more skeptical point of view through Deleuze‘s anti-foundationalist, antipositivist rereading of Humean empiricism. For Deleuze, the Humean breakthrough has
less to do with the well-known empiricist ideas concerning the primacy of sense-data –
the model through which skepticism is ultimately displaced by positivism – than a theory
of subjectivity that foregrounds a radically contingent subjectivity that constitutes itself
as a subject without a transcendental or pre-given orientation. In the absence of any clear
link to a rational ground, I argue that Godwin‘s definition of the ―perfectibility‖ of the
subject necessarily shifts towards a radically deconstructive conception of thought as the
incessant revision and re-thinking of its own assumptions, the ungrounding of that which
has been posited, including what the mind itself would hypostasize as ―truth‖ or reason
according to a history of rational or moral progress.
Chapter 3 extends the analysis of Political Justice into a reading of Godwin‘s
contemporaneous first novel, Caleb Williams (1794). Caleb Williams marks the first of
Godwin‘s texts to move beyond a straightforwardly utopian perspective on his anarchism.
Situating the novel in relation to Godwin‘s initial distinction between Enlightenment
―literature‖ and the illusory ―dreams of romance‖ in the first edition of Political Justice, a
dichotomy that looks forward to classical anarchism‘s assertion of ―natural‖ over
―artificial‖ authority, Caleb Williams shows these terms to be mutually contaminating
rather than antithetical. Invoking Godwin‘s later characterization of the novel as a
psychological ―dissection‖ of his characters‘ motives, I suggest that Caleb Williams
offers a nascent example of a genealogy of classical anarchism‘s morals that exposes the
groundlessness of Caleb‘s search for a justice beyond the trappings of institutional power.
Rather, Godwin shows this justice not only to be implicated in the false consciousness it
seeks to deny, but also conditioned by a deeper, an-archic ―curiosity,‖ a ―restless
propensity‖ and ―fatal impulse‖ that dispossesses the subject as the transparent origin of a
deliberative, rational truth. Focusing on the unpublished and published versions of
28
Godwin‘s conclusion to the novel, I then argue that the text moves from a sense of
defeatism to an idea of ―responsible anarchy‖ forced to account for this dispossession,
and as such providing an opening for Godwin to re-think his anarchism as a task yet to be
fully worked-through.
The following chapter engages in a close reading of Godwin‘s unpublished essay
―Of History and Romance‖ (1797), which, alongside his revisions to Political Justice,
marks a major revision of his earlier assumptions concerning fiction and its relationship
to history. Where Caleb Williams sought to expose the false consciousness of romance
through literary realism only to show this ―realism‖ to be equally romanticized, ―Of
History and Romance‖ argues for the renewed importance of romance as a genre capable
of re-articulating individuality as a form of radical historical contingency. Tracing the
various ambiguities in Godwin‘s attempts to distinguish between the categories of
general history, individual history, and romance, I argue that Godwin theorizes an
individual that is no longer the self-possessed rational subject, but is rather a metaphor
for an anarchē that resists assimilation into generalizing models of historical discourse
emphasized by the historiographers of the Scottish Enlightenment. As such, Godwin
cannot entirely constitute the romantic subject as something outside of history; rather, he
re-articulates this subject according to a counter-factual theorization of ―real history‖ as
romance, which opens the potential to see history with an eye towards what could have
been.
Chapter 5 reads the tangled relationship between history and romance with its
literary counterpart, St. Leon (1799). The novel, which tells of an aristocrat whose
gambling addiction causes him to waste his inheritance and who eventually discovers the
philosopher‘s stone, inverts the approach of Caleb Williams by subjecting the
romanticized/idealized figure of the alchemist to the vicissitudes of history. St. Leon‘s
ambition, which leads him to ruin his family and sees him reviled by all those he tries to
aid with his boundless wealth, has often been read in apologetic or reactionary terms as a
literary representation of the failure of a politics founded on rational perfection. Such an
interpretation, however, implicitly or explicitly valorizes the conservative ethos of
domesticity represented by St. Leon‘s angelic wife Marguerite. To the contrary, I argue
29
that St. Leon can be also be read more an-archically in terms of an experiment with the
counter-factual that re-articulates the individual‘s historical potential to unsettle
institutions. While undesirable from a moral point of view, St. Leon‘s respective
proclivities towards gambling and alchemy are structurally connected through a shared
unpredictability in which the relationship between cause and effect becomes unreliable.
Such unreliability, I claim, opens the possibility of experimenting with ideas in history,
so that St. Leon can claim that ―the world is open‖ (147).
My final chapter analyzes Godwin‘s late novel Mandeville (1817), which, I
suggest, constitutes his most radical literary expression of anarchē. Where St. Leon
concludes with a more hopeful, if skeptical, indication of anarchism‘s historical
(im)possibilities, Mandeville returns to the site of an individual history to expose the
psychic and social traumas that unwork liberal models of history as progressive. By far
Godwin‘s darkest fiction, Mandeville documents the torments of its eponymous
protagonist, a Royalist during the Cromwellian period of British history. After witnessing
his parents‘ slaughter in the Irish Revolt of 1641, the titular Charles Mandeville is raised
in the ancestral home of his shut-in uncle and becomes the misanthropic rival of a
popular and eloquent schoolmate, Clifford. The latter appears as a paragon of the
upwardly mobile liberal progressive, a signifier for the emerging modernity whose
affirmative discourse of inclusiveness, opportunism, optimism, and self-interest, is
juxtaposed with Mandeville‘s ―unusable‖ negativity.22 My argument, however, resists the
tendency embraced by most critics to see Mandeville‘s tortured misanthropy as
debilitating pathology and historical failure. To the contrary, Mandeville exemplifies the
anarchē of a history that refuses to be posited in the public history of counterrevolution
and Restoration, a radically nonproprietary existence that discloses the underside through
which the archē of the ―good‖ and the ―normal‖ legitimize themselves. In doing so,
Mandeville raises the spectre of another history, a history of the other – vividly
22
That is, a refusal to put ―negativity‖ to work in the conventional Hegelian logic in which the negative is
generative of the overall movement by which Spirit reproduces itself in and as history. Unusable negativity
is theorized in particular by Bataille (1989) as the interminable excess of unproductive energies beyond the
restricted use of this energy for utilitarian purposes by individual entities. See also Blanchot (1995), 30066.
30
symbolized in the final pages of the novel in Mandeville‘s metaphoric identification with
the slaves of the West Indies – that returns to haunt civilization with its discontents.
***
In many ways, the deterioration of the reified foundations of society can be understood as
an explicit theme of Godwin‘s philosophical anarchism, insofar as it targets any discourse
that has become hypostasized and any tradition that claims permanence. Initially, Godwin
appears to oppose institution only to reassert the archē of an ―uncontaminated‖ idea of
reason and justice and a confidently teleological vision of history. Yet, key moments in
Godwin‘s philosophy and his literary texts provide tools by which to disclose the gaps
and antagonisms within classical anarchism‘s affirmative rhetoric. In turn, Godwin‘s
career can be shown as a recursive movement in which his philosophical ideals are
experimented upon in and as literature, which in turn provokes more sophisticated
philosophical reflections and reformulations of the tangled relationships between the
subject and its unconscious ―ground,‖ the subject and history, history and romance. As
such, one can perceive in Godwin an implicit challenge to the pragmatic anthropology
that post-anarchism will criticize in the classical anarchist movement to which Godwin
himself gives birth. If Godwin has been canonically understood as the ―origin‖ of
anarchism, then the goal of this study is to argue, as Derrida likewise says of the
différance at the heart of every origin that would claim absolute self-presence, that the
complexities raised by Godwin‘s oeuvre demonstrate a ―non-simple . . . differentiating
origin of differences. Thus, the name ‗origin‘ no longer suits it‖ (Margins of Philosophy
11).
31
Chapter 2
2
“So Variable and Inconstant a System”: The Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice
“Such, I am afraid, is man. Mixed in all his qualities, and inconsistent in all his purposes.
. . . [I]t is vain that the philosopher sits in his airy eminence, and seeks to reduce the
shapeless mass into form, and endeavours to lay down rules for so variable and
inconstant a system: Nature mocks his efforts, and the pertinacity of events belies his
imaginary hypothesis.”
- Godwin, Italian Letters (1784)
Any reconsideration of Godwin‘s anarchism necessarily begins with an examination of
his philosophical masterwork, the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Political Justice
marks the most sustained expression of Godwin‘s anarchism and, for a time, made its
author a prominent voice amongst a circle of rational dissenters in Britain that included
Richard Price, John Thelwall, Thomas Holcroft, and his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft.
As Hazlitt comments, the appearance of Political Justice in February of 1793 brought
Godwin to ―the very zenith of a sultry and unwholesome popularity; he blazed as a sun in
the firmament of reputation; no one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought
after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off‖ (17980). The radicality of Political Justice comes in posing the question of whether there is
some way of pursuing the ideal of a more just society at a moment in which this ideal is
contested at all sides, not only by the repressive measures of the Pitt government and the
increasing violence of the French Revolution, but by any internal or external forms of
coercion that would impede the sovereign deployment of reason. At the heart of
Godwin‘s answer to such difficulties lies his dual conviction that ―man is perfectible, or
in other words susceptible of perpetual improvement‖ (PJ 1:86), and his belief in a
universal principle of justice that supersedes ―the shrine of positive law and political
institution‖ (PJ 1:13). Where perfectibility names a principle of gradual, evolutionary
progression through which an individual, and a society, outstrips the need for institutions,
32
what Godwin will call the ―euthanasia‖ of government, justice constitutes the archē that
grounds the gradual movement towards a society in which ―immutable reason is the true
legislator‖ (PJ 1:221). Anticipating Proudhon, Godwin explicitly rejects ―the evils of
anarchy‖ (PJ 2:367-9) and, in turn, argues that society seeks order in ―anarchism.‖
Very much a product of the Enlightenment, Political Justice demonstrates the
attempt to substitute monarchical with rational authority that post-anarchist theory
associates with the essentialism of classical anarchist theory. To a great extent Godwin
encourages such views, making persistent reference throughout Political Justice to an
―unalterable rule,‖ an ―abstract and immutable‖ principle of justice obtained through the
rigorous exercise of impartial judgment, and setting the stage for nineteenth-century
anarchism‘s orthodox metaphysical desire for a pure place of resistance beyond the
artifices of power (PJ 1:145). As already suggested in the previous chapter, Godwin‘s
Appendix on the ―Prolongation of Human Life‖ speculates on a future in which the
rational mind will be completely ―omnipotent over matter,‖ thus liberating humanity
from necessity. At the same time, Godwin‘s successive revisions to Political Justice
show the text moving away from the rationalism of the first edition and towards the
empirical language of Locke, Helvetius, and Hume.23 Writing in 1800, Godwin suggests
that Political Justice was ―blemished principally by three errors‖: Stoicism,
―Sandemanianism, or an inattention to the principle that feeling, and not judgment, is the
source of human actions,‖ and finally ―the unqualified condemnation of the private
affections.‖ ―The first of these errors,‖ Godwin continues, ―has been corrected with some
care in the subsequent edition of Political Justice. The second and third owe their
destruction to a perusal of Hume‘s Treatise of Human Nature‖ (Collected Novels and
Memoirs 1:54).
23
All references to the earlier editions of PJ in this chapter are taken from the third volume of the facsimile
edition of the 1798 version of the text edited by Priestley. The third volume of Priestley‘s edition notes all
of the changes that Godwin had made to both the 1793 and 1796 editions of PJ, thus providing a tangible
record of Godwin‘s revisions and a means to trace the shifts in his thinking about his politics over the
course of the 1790‘s.
33
More traditional criticism often tends to read the anarchism of Political Justice
either as a ―Platonic‖ rationalism or a proto-utilitarianism24 whose recovery of feeling
engenders a principle of ―universal benevolence‖ in Godwin that prefaces nineteenthcentury anarchism‘s hope for a society based on ―mutual aid‖ (Newman 42). Godwin‘s
subsequent attention to feeling, moreover, has been interpreted as a byproduct of his
relationship with Wollstonecraft, which, it is argued, led him to ―soften‖ his prior
emphasis on rational disinterestedness.25 However, such readings tend to emphasize an
overall consistency within Godwin‘s philosophical project that minimizes the
deconstructive potentials implicitly generated within a text that collapses, in its very
attempts to accommodate, the antithetical discourses of Platonic rationality and empirical
skepticism. Thus, although a critic such as Peter Marshall points to the heightened
skepticism of the second and third editions of the text, he also accedes to Godwin‘s own
view that the ―spirit and the great outlines‖ of the work remain fundamentally unchanged
(William Godwin 156).
However, if empiricism, as Zuzana Parusnikova argues with respect to Hume,
works ―against the spirit of foundations‖ in its ―skeptical conclusions concerning the
legitimacy of our knowledge,‖ then Godwin can no longer posit the legislative, normative
power of an a priori principle as an uncontaminated point of departure for a rational
anarchism (4). The inclusion of empiricism within Political Justice leads Godwin to
uneasily juxtapose the archē of justice with a skeptical epistemology that renders this
principle uncertain, the contingent or fictive projection of a mind for which reason is no
longer a priori, and thus incapable of guaranteeing an underlying archē-telos through
which subjectivity and history could be understood as perfectible. This uncertainty
likewise affects the significance of Godwin‘s introduction of ―feeling‖ into Political
Justice: where more orthodox interpretations tend to minimize feeling as incidental to
Godwin‘s overarching project, feeling bears the potential to substantively unground
24
In ―Platonism in William Godwin‘s Political Justice‖ (1943), Priestley invokes Godwin‘s recurring use
of ―absolute‖ principles against the conventional association of Political Justice with empirical and
utilitarian thought by critics such as C.H. Driver (1931) and Elie Halevy (1934).
25
Philp argues that Godwin‘s shift towards the language of sensibility can be explained by his changing
circle of friends between 1790-6 and, especially, the influence of Wollstonecraft (189-223).
34
Godwin‘s rational politics by displacing and complicating its very foundations. As Pfau
suggestively remarks, a closer look at Godwin‘s transition towards empiricism in
Political Justice discloses a ―growing awareness of its own programmatic impossibility‖;
hence, ―few treatises‖ would ―seem to call for a deconstructive reading more loudly than
Godwin's magnum opus‖ (Romantic Moods 115).
Following this deconstructive impetus, this chapter will argue that Godwin‘s
growing awareness of the ―impossibility‖ of a rational anarchism begins to surface in the
interstices of this crucial revision of his conceptual lexicon from rationalism to a more
empirical approach in successive editions of Political Justice. In order to disclose the anarchic dimensions within this shift, I depart from traditional definitions that reduce
empiricism to an incipiently positivist or utilitarian doctrine that sees knowledge as
derived from the senses alone.26 Rather, this chapter takes its cue from Deleuze‘s radical
re-interpretation of Humean empiricism as the starting point for the displacement of any
transcendental rational archē: ―We can now see the special ground of empiricism: . . .
nothing is ever transcendental‖ (Empiricism 23). As Bruce Baugh points out, Deleuze‘s
empiricism is ―a concern for contingency . . . and a resistance to universalizing
abstractions through emphasis on . . . particularity‖ and experimentation (133). Deleuze‘s
approach to empiricism will allow us to (re)read Godwin's own empiricism otherwise, as
an opening gesture towards what Jon Klancher identifies as Godwin‘s passage from
―necessity‖ to ―contingency‖ (―Godwin and the Genre Reformers‖ 28-33). Unlike
Klancher, however, this chapter sees this transition within the very discourse of necessity
that Godwin maintains in Political Justice; that is to say, for my own argument,
Godwin‘s discussion of necessity in the later editions of Political Justice is not opposed
to contingency so much as it becomes another means of expressing it.
Nonetheless, insofar as Godwin does not completely abandon the language of
perfectibility, Political Justice‘s turn towards skepticism is not entirely self-consuming.
Nor does Godwin‘s approach to anarchism simply capitulate to the positivist or utilitarian
26
This classical or ―textbook‖ definition of empiricism, as Derrida points out in Of Grammatology,
produces a reification of experience as the positive ground of knowledge, thus reinstating experience as
another form of metaphysical ―presence‖: ―'Experience has always designated the relationship with a
presence, whether that relationship had the form of consciousness or not‖ (60).
35
concern with matters of fact. Rather, Godwin‘s use of empiricism allows us to reread the
programmatic impossibility of perfectibility so as to see it as a thinking that points
beyond itself and, as such, remains opposed to ―things as they are.‖ In this respect, this
chapter argues that one might read perfectibility as less programmatic than
―diagrammatic,‖ in Deleuze and Guattari‘s sense of a future potentiality that ―does not
function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come,
a new type of reality‖ (A Thousand Plateaus 142). In this sense, one might discover that
the means of avoiding the more absolutist tendencies of Godwinian perfectibility may be
within the very terms of perfectibility itself, albeit a perfectibility whose encounter with
empiricism dissolves its status as archē. In turn, Political Justice can be read as a
framework for a more (self-)critical or deconstructive anarchism that, as Sue Chaplin
argues, begins to approximate deconstructive approaches to the idea of ―justice‖ (119). If,
as Godwin argues, perfectibility requires that ―we should never consider the book of
enquiry as shut,‖ the task of ―unlimited speculation‖ must be open to ―new information‖
that would be capable of modifying previous knowledge, overturning ideas that have
become reified – what Godwin names ―institutions‖ (PJ 1:68, 3:241, 1:220). But if
enquiry is to be truly unlimited and open to the new, it must also be involved in a restless
process of scrutinizing and revising its own foundations.
The chapter that follows unfolds this argument through an examination of several
interconnected ideas central to Political Justice. I first explore how Godwin‘s skeptical
epistemology reimagines subjectivity through empiricism as a groundless, ―Protean‖
figure in constant flux. I then explore how this idea informs, and complicates, Godwin‘s
definitions of institution and his attempt to re-found anarchism on the basis of
perfectibility. Institution functions primarily by ―positing‖ itself as something
foundational and permanent, rather than the reified product of contingency and
circumstance. To the contrary, Godwin defines perfectibility as that which unfixes
thought from institutional stasis. Godwin nonetheless attempts to discipline this
―unrestrained‖ form of thinking within a conception of reason that his own epistemology
skeptically dismantles. In the wake of this dismantling, the final section reconsiders
Godwin's conceptualization of perfectibility and justice as anticipating more postanarchist and deconstructive approaches that no longer interpret justice through the
36
totalizing metanarrative of rationality. The consequence, I argue, is that while Godwin
rhetorically remains within the confines of Enlightenment, his sense of justice as an
emphasis on the particular or the singular logically deprives justice of its legislative
authority. In doing so, Godwin opens the possibility of reading perfectibility as a signifier
for the an-archic (in)completion and ever-renewed task of the political.
2.1 Arrested Development: Epistemology and the Positive
Institution
In a prefatory ―Note to the Reader‖ for his 1976 edition of the third version of Political
Justice, Isaac Kramnick cites a footnote in which Godwin recommends that ―the reader
who is indisposed to abstruse speculations will find the other members of the Treatise
sufficiently connected without express reference to this and the three following chapters
of the present book,‖ namely, ―Of Free Will and Necessity,‖ ―Inferences from the
Doctrine of Necessity,‖ ―Of the Mechanism of the Human Mind,‖ and ―Of Self-Love and
Benevolence.‖ Kramnick seconds Godwin‘s advice by suggesting that further chapters
―may be passed over without jeopardy to the more important arguments in the book,‖
including ―The Characters of Men Originate in their External Circumstances‖ and ―The
Voluntary Actions of Men Originate in their Opinions‖ (56-7); in short, Kramnick
extends Godwin‘s recommendation to suggest that one might overlook the entire
epistemology that underwrites Godwinian anarchism.
I call attention to Kramnick‘s ―Note‖ less to criticize Kramnick himself than to
highlight how conventional approaches to Political Justice often marginalize Godwin‘s
―abstruse speculations‖ in favour of his more overtly political arguments. Reducing
Godwin‘s epistemology to a secondary concern for his anarchism proves difficult when
assessing his novels and his later emphasis on ―individual history‖ in ―Of History and
Romance,‖ both of which foreground the psychological as a complex and irreducible
element within the political. As this section will argue, it is precisely those chapters
considered secondary in Political Justice that find Godwin beginning to problematize his
own desire for a rational anarchism. Moreover, Godwin reads against the grain of his own
advice by pointing out that the epistemological is primary to understanding the nature and
37
extent of the influence of institution. In the much expanded and revised fourth chapter to
the 1796 and 1798 editions, titled ―The Characters of Men Originate in their External
Circumstances,‖ 27 Godwin writes that although his first three chapters have ―collected a
very strong presumptive evidence‖ against ―political institutions‖ we ―can never arrive at
precise conceptions relative to this part of the subject without entering into an analysis of
the human mind‖ (PJ 1:24-5). Godwin‘s political aims are therefore subtended by a
rigorous enquiry into the epistemological basis upon which political subjectivity is
formed. This epistemology, in turn, would then become the ground upon which classical
anarchism will model its vision of society. However, the growing influence of Humean
empiricism in Political Justice will place this vision in question by implicitly raising the
problem of whether such optimism is justifiable within the demands of an epistemology
that skeptically abjures the axiomatic role of foundations.
Godwin‘s epistemology begins from a skeptical questioning of whether one can
ever obtain certain knowledge of any objective ―substance‖ that exists external to the
mind: ―we know nothing of the substance or substratum, or of that which is the recipient
of thought and perception. . . . [T]he common and received opinion, that we do perceive
such ground‖ is ―nothing more than a vulgar prejudice‖ (PJ 1:25 n2, 369).28 In the
absence of any verifiable, substantial a priori in which to ground thought, Godwin
follows Hume‘s well-known arguments concerning the self as a ―bundle or collection of
different perceptions‖ in perpetual flux, rather than a formal container in which ideas
inhere. ―Ideas are to the mind nearly what atoms are to the body,‖ writes Godwin, ―the
27
See PJ 3:141-3. In the 1793 edition, this chapter was originally Chapter 3 of Book 1, and was titled ―The
Moral Characters of Men Originate in their Perceptions.‖ Godwin added pages 24-9 to the 1796 edition (PJ
3:141), which includes the injunction that an examination of the epistemological and psychological is
necessary to arrive at any ―precise conceptions‖ of the political. In a footnote added to the second edition,
Godwin criticizes the ―overscrupulousness‖ of the first edition for neglecting a more thorough examination
of epistemology, which, following Locke and Helvetius rather than Hume, had simply asserted the absence
of innate principles to ground the original equality of individuals at birth (PJ 3:142).
28
In the 1796 edition, Godwin added a reference to Boscovich to the second note on PJ 1:24-5 (3:141),
which only previously contained references to Locke, Helvetius, Rousseau‘s Emile, and Hartley‘s
Observations on Man (3:142). Godwin likely knew Boscovich‘s Theoria Philosophiæ Naturalis (1763),
which had rejected the existence of primary qualities in physics, through his friend Joseph Priestley. See
Schofield (2004), 2:71-5. Nietzsche also credits Boscovich‘s theorization of atoms as ―centres of force,‖
rather than material entities, with having dethroned substantialist ontologies. See Poellner (1995), 48-57. In
the third edition, Godwin then added references to Berkeley and Hume.
38
whole mass is in a perpetual flux; nothing is stable and permanent; after the lapse of a
given period not a single particle probably remains the same‖ (Hume, Treatise 252;
Godwin, PJ 1:35).29 The mind is a fluid medium in which ―there is the unity of
uninterrupted succession, the perennial flow as of a stream, where the drop indeed that
succeeds is numerically distinct from that which went before, but there is no cessation. . .
. [A]n infinite number of thoughts passed through my mind in the last five minutes‖ (PJ
1:411). Though the stream appears unified, it cannot be called ―simple‖ in the sense of
indivisible: ―there is nothing less frequent than the apprehending of a simple idea.‖
Rather, this ―stream‖ is an irreducible complexity in which ―every perception is
complicated by a variety of simultaneous impressions‖ and ―imperceptibly modified by
the miniature impressions which accompany it. . . . Of thought, it may be said, in a
practical sense, what has been affirmed of matter, that it is infinitely divisible‖ (PJ 1:4124).30
For Godwin, as for Hume, the mind is ―a collection without an album,‖ ―a pure
and dispersed anarchic multiplicity, without unity or totality‖ in which elements are
―welded, glued together by . . . the very absence of a link‖ (Deleuze, Empiricism 23;
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 324).31 Infinite divisibility serves as the a priori of
thought, the an-archic infrastructure presupposed by and against which all abstract or
positive features of consciousness will appear: ―the resolution of objects into their simple
elements is an operation of science and improvement; but it is altogether foreign to our
first and original conceptions. . . . We do not begin with the successive perception of
elementary parts till we have obtained an idea of a whole; but beginning with a whole,
are capable of reducing it into its elements‖ (PJ 1:407). Although described as a ―whole,‖
the empirical mind is not a ―totality‖ since it entirely lacks the constancy and uniformity
29
PJ 1: 35-51, which detail Godwin‘s idea of consciousness as an unstable ―flux,‖ were added to the 1796
edition, replacing a shorter passage in the 1793 version in which Godwin outlined his thoughts on
education (3:142).
30
Godwin first mentions ―infinite divisibility‖ in the second edition of PJ, with slight revisions to the
punctuation and wording of the passage for the third edition. The first edition reads: ―it is perhaps a law of
our nature, that thoughts shall at all times succeed to each other with equal rapidity‖ (PJ 3:174).
31
―The mind,‖ Hume argues, ―is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their
appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations‖ (Treatise
253).
39
that constitute the formation of ideas as generalities or ―elementary parts.‖ Rather, in its
―original conceptions,‖ the mind is nothing but ―delirium, contingency‖ and does not
have the properties of a ―pre-existing subject‖ (Deleuze, Empiricism 29). Godwin‘s
overall picture of the self is not that of a ―simple‖ atomic entity presupposed by liberal
traditions, but a complex of impulses, ideas, and affects woven together from disparate
strands: ―everything . . . may be said to be in a state of flux; he is a Proteus whom we
know not how to detain‖ (PJ 1:151).32
Godwin extends this epistemological insight into a claim that ―continual flux
appears to take place in every part of the universe. . . . [M]ind, as well as matter, exhibits
a constant conjunction of events‖ (PJ 1:412, 368). ―The history of the universe,‖
according to Godwin, is composed of an infinite ―train of antecedents and
consequences‖: ―everything in the universe is linked and united together. No event,
however minute and imperceptible, is barren of a train of consequences, however
comparatively evanescent those consequences may in some instances be found‖ (PJ
1:159, 42). Godwin here adapts a classical doctrine of necessity inherited from Spinoza,
Leibniz, Baron d‘Holbach, and Roger Boscovich that sees the ―universe‖ as an
interimplicated ―chain of events, generated in the lapse of ages going on in regular
procession through the whole period of our existence‖ (PJ 1:384), an ever-receding series
of antecedents that never reaches any definitive terminus. For Godwin, a terminal-point
can ―never be discovered‖: ―trace back the chain as far as you please, every act at which
you arrive is necessary‖ (PJ 1:377). Such claims would seem philosophically problematic
alongside Godwin‘s use of empiricism, since his attempt to describe a necessity within
the ―history of the universe‖ itself transgresses the skeptical embargo against assuming
the objective existence of properties which we can only determine as principles of the
mind. According to Frank Evans III, Godwin‘s importation of psychological necessity
into a supposition about the natural universe transforms his empiricism into a ―hardened
dogmatism‖ (640). Yet, Godwin‘s paradoxical adoption of Humean terms such as
―antecedent‖ and ―consequent‖ to describe this history, which increasingly replaces his
32
The Protean image of ―man‖ first appears in Chapter 4 of Book 2 (―Of Personal Virtue and Duty‖),
which Godwin almost completely rewrote for the second edition of PJ.
40
references to the deterministic language of cause and effect in the first and second
editions of Political Justice, suggests that his view of necessity is not reducible to a
dogmatic materialism.33 On the contrary, because Godwin conflates ―necessity‖ with the
infinite divisibility he discerns within the anarchy of the mind, his image of the universe
begins to approximate something infinitely self-differentiating, thus rendering any clear
distinction between necessity and contingency undecidable.
Godwin‘s recognition that the complex an-archically precedes the simple within
the mind and also within the ―universe‖ itself provides some initial insight into his
critique of institutions. Playing off of the etymology of the term itself – institution (instatuere) being formed out of the PIE base sta-, which goes into words like stasis, state,
statue, static, stagnant, station, stability – Godwin defines the latter as that which is
―calculated to give perpetuity to any particular mode of thinking‖ (PJ 1:xxvi; Scrivener
616). In this sense, Godwin does not limit institution to external phenomena such as
government; rather, institution describes a way of being or a disposition of thought, a
govern-mentality that could be said to be the conditioning possibility for the emergence
of more identifiable state apparatuses. Institutions are generalizations that become ―habits
of a second sort‖:
In this state of the human being, he soon comes to perceive a considerable
similarity between situation and situation. In consequence he feels inclined to
abridge the process of deliberation, and to act today conformably to the
determination of yesterday. Thus the understanding fixes for itself resting places, is
no longer a novice, and is not at the trouble continually to go back and revise the
original reasons which determined it to a course of action. Thus the man acquires
33
See especially Godwin‘s revisions to Book 4, Chapter 9, ―Of the Mechanism of the Human Mind,‖ in the
1798 edition of the text, which replaces most references to cause and effect from 1793 and 1796 with
―consequent‖ and ―antecedent‖ (PJ 3: 173). By 1798, Godwin had removed much of the deterministic
language he had adopted from French materialists such as d‘Holbach. For example in Book 4, Chapter 8 of
the 1798 edition, Godwin replaces a reference to the ―idea of the universe‖ as a ―body of events . . .
connected and cemented in all its parts, nothing in the boundless progress of things being capable of
happening otherwise than it has actually happened‖ with ―the experienced succession of antecedents and
consequents‖ (PJ 3:171; 1:384). See also Priestley‘s Supplementary Critical Notes to Book 4, Chapter 7:
―The phrasing in the third edition is modified to conform with the Humean criticism of causality. . . .
‗[C]ause and effect‘ become ‗antecedent and consequent‘‖ (PJ 3:123).
41
habits from which it is very difficult to wean him, and which he obeys without
being able to assign either to himself or others any explicit reason for his
proceeding. This is the history of prepossession and prejudice. (PJ 1:65)
Prepossession occurs when one is ―engrossed by a particular view of the subject‖ to the
detriment of other perspectives, reifying certain experiences into fixed ―resting places‖
(PJ 1:81), hypostases that give thought the appearance of having arrived at a conclusive
truth. Institution, in short, is the repose of thought. Such repose is the consequence of an
epistemology in which the anarchy of the mind achieves ―stasis‖ through a fictioning of
identity via the principles of association, ―the property which one thought existing in the
mind is found to have, of introducing a second thought through the means of some link of
connection between them‖ (PJ 1:405).34 Association ―naturalizes‖ the mind by drawing
relationships between discontinuous impressions, facilitating easy transitions that
produce the belief in causation and necessity, and imposing constancy on the mind‘s
delirium by organizing it into a ―system‖ or identity. For this identity to exist, the ideas
associated in the mind must also be regarded as separate from the flux of immediate
impressions from which it is composed (80), what Hume calls the ―feigning [of] a
continu‘d being which may fill those intervals‖ between impressions, ―and preserve a
perfect and entire identity to our perceptions,‖ enabling the mind to ―go beyond what is
immediately present to the senses‖ (qtd. in Deleuze, Empiricism 82; emphasis mine). As
Godwin likewise puts it in a later essay, ―we frame propositions, and, detaching ourselves
from the immediate impressions of sense, proceed to generalities‖ (Thoughts on Man
244). Although generalities allow one to move beyond the anarchy of the mind so as to
make possible any knowledge whatsoever, they also demonstrate a natural tendency of
thought to confuse similarity with permanence.
Godwin will also frequently refer to institution as ―positive,‖ a term that has
extended significance in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries prior to its
canonization as ―positivism‖ by Comte. In his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
34
Godwin‘s extended meditation on association, which begins in the final paragraph of PJ 1:404, was
added for the 1796 edition (PJ 3:173).
42
Sciences (1816-32), Hegel defines the positive as the fiction of something impervious to
change, ―quietly abiding within its own limits,‖ while Schelling‘s 1802 lectures On
University Studies describes the ―positive sciences‖ as discourses that ―attain to
objectivity within the state‖ (Hegel, Logic §92, 10; Schelling 78-80). Schelling further
characterizes the positive sciences as ―historical‖; that is, as sciences at the service of
state power and therefore limited by the prepossessions of their finite historical contexts.
Schelling‘s sense of positive sciences as ―historical‖ can also be discerned in the French
Encyclopédie, another influential source for Godwin‘s thought. In his entry on ―Natural
Law,‖ d‘Argis aligns positive laws with convention and consensus, cross-referencing it
with private and public civil codes and the laws of nations. Analogously, Louis de
Jaucourt frames his article on ―Parental Authority‖ with respect to ―the positive laws of
God that relate to the obedience of children,‖ while Romilly‘s entry on virtue argues that
one ―not seek for what constitutes virtue in positive laws, nor in human conventions;
these laws are born, altered, and succeed each other, like those who make them.‖
Whatever is positive demands obedience through the illusion of permanence,
universality, and the non-relativity of its own values. In Godwin‘s view, the ―history‖ of
political society chiefly consists in the prolonged stasis of old values, whose
sedimentation leads the present to conform to the ―determinations of yesterday.‖ Like
Paine and the other Jacobin radicals, Godwin sees such determinations exemplified in the
quasi-mythical origins and traditions codified in social hierarchies and discourses of
national law defended by conservatives such as Edmund Burke. Such ―fictions of law,‖
as Godwin calls them, constitute a ―Gothic and unintelligible burden‖ on the present,
instituting the positivity of a history prepossessed and mapped out in advance with
reference to a mysterious, unfathomable foundation (PJ 2:101). Consequently, Godwin
will also draw a suggestive comparison between institution and the biological theory of
pre-formation,35 which claims there is a ―mystical magazine, shut up in the human
embryo, whose treasures are to be gradually unfolded‖ (PJ 1:31). Pre-formation suggests
35
The mention of pre-formation in PJ suggests that Godwin was at least partially aware of the debate in
biology between pre-formation and epigenesis begun in 1759 by embryologist Caspar Friedrich Wolff. See
Mayr (2007), 156-8.
43
that ―nothing more,‖ writes the Abbé Pluche in his 1732 Spectacle de la nature, ―will be
produced in all the ages to follow. . . . [E]lements always the same, species that never
vary, seeds and germs prepared in advance for the perpetuation of everything . . . Nothing
new under the sun‖ (qtd. in Lovejoy 243). Pre-formation in biology, like prepossession in
thought, is an institution because it compels us to think of life within already established
patterns, whether it be of ideas or life-forms. Godwin‘s description of pre-formation here
echoes what Kant identifies with determinant judgment. Like determinant judgment, preformation suggests that ―the universal (rule, principle, or law) is given‖ and ―subsumes
the particular under it,‖ thereby restricting knowledge to the limitations and prejudices of
what is already known (Critique of Judgment 15). In Godwin‘s terms, the determinant
has a tendency to ―fix the human character independently of any species of education‖
and thus independently of any potential improvement: ―How long has the genius of
education been disheartened and unnerved by the pretence that man is born all that it is
possible for him to become?‖ (PJ 1:43).
2.2 The Anarchē of Perfectibility
As we shall see in Chapter 4, in both ―Of History and Romance‖ and his later essay
―Imitation and Invention‖ for Thoughts on Man, Godwin explicitly rejects the doctrine
that there is ―nothing new under the sun.‖ In Political Justice, Godwin‘s observation that
―flux‖ constitutes the basic character of both mind and nature already gestures to the
radical instability of any form of thought that would institute itself as permanent. Since
―not a single particle‖ within the mind is the same from one moment to the next,
institution is constituted on a forgetting of its own contingent emergence from an anarchic ―ground‖ that does not prepossess it. Godwin therefore contrasts institutional
stasis with a model of thinking as ―enquiry‖ that is itself in flux and open to perpetual
revision, the ―incessant industry‖ of a ―curiosity never to be disheartened or fatigued, by
a spirit of enquiry to which a philanthropic mind will allow no pause. . . . [E]verything
most interesting to the general welfare, wholly delivered from restraint, should be in a
state of change‖ (PJ 2:231-2). As Alain Thévenet points out, for Godwin ―the principal
criticism that one can make of government is that it aims at maintaining things in a state
and is thus opposed to the flux of life, to the law of change‖ (29; translation mine).
44
This more flexible model of thought‘s ―progressive nature‖ is precisely what
Godwin identifies with perfectibility in the second and third editions of Political Justice:
the ―faculty of being continually made better and receiving perpetual improvement‖ (PJ
1:116, 93). Accordingly, Godwin distinguishes perfectibility from ―perfection.‖ Achieved
perfection, within the context of Godwin‘s turn towards empiricism, falls within the
definition of a ―fiction‖ hypostasized as institution, since it would mean ―an end to our
improvement‖ (PJ 1:93). Like his skeptical reconsideration of the unstable
epistemological ground of the political subject, Godwin‘s qualification of perfectibility as
improvement in the revised second edition of Political Justice is a significant shift from
the edition of 1793. In the second edition, the discussion on perfectibility in Chapter 5 of
Book 1 – titled ―The Voluntary Actions of Men Originate in their Opinions‖ – replaces
Book 1 Chapter 4 of the first edition, in which Godwin previously discussed ―The Three
Principle Causes of Moral Improvement‖: literature, education, and political justice.36
Although Godwin had used the word ―improvement‖ in 1793, the rhetoric of the earlier
chapter remains deterministic, invoking literature, education, and political justice as
―causes‖ by which ―the human mind is advanced towards a state of perfection‖ (PJ
3:239; emphasis mine). Improvement, in this instance, is a temporary moment through
which history passes on its way to an achievable end ―state‖ of perfection. Thus, although
Godwin admits that ―it is not easy to define the exact proportion of discovery that must
necessarily precede political melioration,‖ ―when the most considerable part of a nation,
either [because of] numbers or influence, becomes convinced of the flagrant absurdity of
its institutions, the whole will soon be prepared tranquilly and by a sort of common
consent to supersede them‖ (PJ 3:242).
In the revised editions of the text, Godwin theoretically aligns perfectibility with
flux rather than a ―state of perfection,‖ recognizing, through the growing influence of
Hume, how empiricism ungrounds the reliability of any philosophical language of
determining causes that could be used to justify an objectively existing state of the world.
We have already seen, in our introductory chapter, how this shift in Godwin‘s thinking
36
See ―Omitted Chapters‖ in the Priestley edition, PJ 3:239-47. I discuss Godwin‘s understanding of
―literature‖ in the first edition of PJ in the following chapter.
45
displaces his view of a perfected state of existence by relegating it to an ―Appendix‖ that
is, as Godwin twice warns us, only ―mere speculation.‖ At the same time, Godwin‘s
skeptical turn in 1796 and 1798 also generates a more anxious counter-desire within
Political Justice to maintain the archē of an ―immutable justice‖ that would be capable of
ensuring the ―progressive nature‖ of perfectibility, one that would discipline the
potentially self-consuming implications of the unconditional flux of thought (PJ 1:186,
155). Through the authority of justice as a ―true foundation,‖ Godwin could then deduce
―the moral equality of mankind [sic],‖ by which he understands ―the propriety of
applying one unalterable rule of justice to every case that may arise. This cannot be
questioned, but upon arguments that would subvert the very nature of virtue‖ (PJ 1:145).
As an unquestionable principle, Godwin appears to situate justice in the form of
what Ernst Cassirer identifies as Enlightenment‘s fascination with the ―concept of the law
as such.‖ The law ―as such‖ is opposed to both ―theological dogma‖ and ―state
absolutism,‖ because it is a rule that is ―not founded in the sphere of mere power and will
but in the sphere of pure reason. . . . It is an ‗ordering order‘ (ordo ordinans), not
‗ordered order‘ (ordo ordinatus)‖ (238-40). Godwin extends this idea of justice as a
transcendental ―ordering order‖ further where he discusses the individual‘s right to
private judgment. As Andrew McCann points out, the ―public sphere is suspect for
Godwin, because its structures faithfully replicate the logic of a state political apparatus
antithetical to enlightened public interaction‖ (―William Godwin and the Pathological
Public Sphere‖ 203). Wherever ―universal consent‖ would establish ―absurdity and
injustice,‖ Godwin argues that ―the most insignificant individual ought to hold himself
free‖: ―If a congregation of men agree universally to cut off their right hand [or] to shut
their ears upon free enquiry . . . in all these cases they are wrong, and ought
unequivocally to be censured for usurping an authority that does not belong to them.
They ought to be told, ‗Gentlemen, you are not . . . omnipotent; there is an authority
greater than yours, to which you are bound assiduously to conform yourselves‘‖ (PJ
1:166). Justice is not the product of a consensus between individuals but an exercise of a
right to private judgment as the ―only legitimate principle‖ capable of ―imposing on him
the duty of adopting any species of conduct‖ (PJ 1:181). As such, Godwin suggests that
while governments and institutions are themselves the products of convention and a
46
certain agreement between individuals, truth itself ―cannot be made more true by the
number of its votaries. Nor is the spectacle much less interesting, of a solitary individual,
bearing his undaunted testimony in favour of justice, though opposed by misguided
millions‖ (PJ 1:220).
In light of Godwin‘s epistemological skepticism concerning foundational
principles, this proto-romantic vision of the individual heroically asserting the noncontingent authority of a right to private judgment against the ―vulgar mob‖37 seems
aporetic. Insofar as this right is not subject to ―consensus‖ but, simultaneously, cannot be
considered ―static‖ in the same sense as an institution, Godwin anticipates what one
might call a ―quasi-transcendental‖ view of justice. The quasi-transcendental, as Gasché
argues in his reading of Derridean différance, names an originary ground that is neither
an origin nor a ground in the traditional sense. Rather, the quasi-transcendental is a
―nonfundamental structure‖ that ―simultaneously grounds and ungrounds‖ (155). The
quasi-transcendental is, in a certain sense, an-archic insofar as it does not completely
negate the transcendental, but deploys the inescapable language of the transcendental to
suggest an ―outside‖ or condition that such language cannot fully apprehend within its
own boundaries, an anterior rather than ―ulterior‖ principle that is paradoxically ―more
‗originary‘ than any classical origin‖ (Gasché 152). Both beyond law and
epistemologically unverifiable, what Godwin identifies as justice names both the
condition of possibility and impossibility of the private judgment that it ostensibly
―grounds.‖
But Godwin‘s quasi-transcendental sense of justice also appears to reconstitute an
orthodox metaphysical binary in which justice appears as an ultimate ―truth‖ or archē
capable of expelling institution as an artificial, hence removable, attribute of human
nature: ―the vices and moral weaknesses of man are not invincible. . . . Vice and
weakness are founded upon ignorance and error; but truth is more powerful than any
champion that can be brought into the field against it; consequently truth has the faculty
37
The influence of Milton‘s Satan on Godwin, and on anarchism more generally, becomes especially
evident in this passage. As Scrivener suggests, Godwin ―has not been duly credited for developing the
‗Satanic‘ reading of Paradise Lost‖ (618). See also, PJ 1:72, 323.
47
of expelling weakness and vice, and placing nobler and more beneficent principles in
their stead‖ (PJ 1:92). Such claims might be said to lend credence to the post-anarchist
critique of classical forms of anarchism that simply replace one authoritative archē with
another. As such, Godwin remains within the hierarchical structure in which the inversion
of institution for perfectibility, ―stasis‖ for ―flux,‖ reaffirms the very authority it claims to
overthrow. At least initially, Godwin‘s rationale for justice as a ―true foundation‖ simply
appears unconvincing. Not unlike Kant‘s equally strained claim for a ―guiding thread of
reason‖ in history to ward off the vertiginous thought that ―man‘s actions on the world
stage‖ may in fact be ―aimless‖ (―Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent‖
120-1), Godwin seems to assert a quasi-transcendental principle of justice and
perfectibility for no other reason than a fear that the absence of such principles ―would
subvert the very nature of virtue.‖ Perfectibility reserves the right to question everything
but its own legislative authority. In this respect, what Deleuze says of Kant‘s moral
philosophy appears salient with respect to Godwin: ―We are legislators ourselves only
insofar as we make proper use of [the faculty of reason] and allot our other faculties tasks
which conform to it. . . . Reason represents our slavery and our subjection as something
superior which make us reasonable beings‖ (Nietzsche 92-3).
However, the very terms of Godwin‘s skepticism implicitly raise the question as
to whether his irrepressible faith in justice can claim even a quasi-transcendental status
for archē, or if such foundations can no longer function as anything more than what
Reiner Schürmann had identified with anarchē as ―a blank space deprived of legislative,
normative, power.‖ Such issues become evident with Godwin‘s progressive displacement
of reason within the conceptual vocabulary of Political Justice. Under the sixth section of
the ―Summary of Principles‖ added to the 1798 edition, Godwin writes that ―reason is not
an independent principle, and has no tendency to excite us to action‖; rather, ―the
voluntary actions of men are under the direction of their feelings‖ (PJ 1:xxvi). No longer
―independent,‖ Godwin ungrounds reason‘s legitimacy as a principle capable of guiding
subjective agency such that it becomes ―merely a comparison and balancing of feeling.‖
At the same time, Godwin wants to maintain reason as a quasi-transcendental means of
disciplining feeling: although reason ―cannot excite us to action, it is calculated to
48
regulate our conduct,‖ and thus ―it is to the improvement of reason . . . that we are to look
for the improvement of our social condition‖ (PJ 1:xxvi).
Nonetheless, within Godwin‘s own epistemological framework, ―improvement‖
can no longer function as an axiom that would secure an enlightened vision of history as
teleologically progressive. Since reason is no longer privileged as an autonomous agency
within the mind, improvement itself becomes contingent, the chance byproduct of an
anarchy of conflicting motivations and affects that can never be completely apprehended
within a stable form, only momentarily ―balanced‖ by a rationality that always comes too
late to grasp the underlying causes that govern its so-called voluntary actions.
Consequently, Godwin sees rational consciousness as ―a sort of supplementary
reflection‖ that ―seems to be a second thought‖ rather than something foundational (PJ
1:404). Where the first edition of Political Justice places the supplementarity of
consciousness within a teleological passage from the ―involuntary‖ to the ―voluntary‖ or
intentional,38 Godwin‘s increased emphasis on an an-archic substructure of thought and
the loss of reason‘s ―independence‖ in his revisions discloses the impossibility of
reason‘s ability to coincide with itself. Consciousness only ―adverts to its own situation,
and observes that it has it‖ (PJ 1:404) through a process of supplementation that
paradoxically separates it from what it is conscious of, namely, itself: in order to be selfconscious, consciousness must hollow itself out as an ―impartial‖ other who observes it,
rendering the structure of self-knowing incomplete in the moment of its very completion.
As Pfau avers, Godwin‘s conception of a mind subject to an infinite, uninterrupted flood
of thoughts an-archically displaces rational consciousness as ―forever catching up with
its own origin‖ (Romantic Moods 118).
By disclosing the anarchic substructure of thought, Godwin likewise exposes the
groundlessness of an Enlightenment subjectivity predicated on the freedom of the
(rational) will. In the first edition, Godwin had also rejected the doctrine of free will,
38
In the 1793 edition of the chapter, Godwin writes: ―here it may be proper to observe, that, from the
principles already delivered, it follows that all the original motions of the animal system are involuntary. In
proportion however as we obtain experience, they are successively made the subjects of reflection and
foresight; and of consequence become many of them the themes of intention and design‖ (3:173).
49
claiming that ―all actions are necessary,‖ but that involuntary actions could be
―successively made the subjects of reflection and foresight; and of consequence become
many of them the themes of intention and design‖ (PJ 3:173). In all three editions,
Godwin thus argues that subjectivity is ―founded in actions originally involuntary‖ (PJ
1:65). Godwin identifies voluntary actions as those accompanied by foresight and
―decisions of the understanding.‖ However, such actions are the ―effects‖ of involuntary,
sub-representational processes rather than deriving from the intentionality of an ego: ―it
will be absurd for a man to say, ‗I will exert myself.‘. . . Man is in reality a passive, and
not an active being‖ (PJ 1:389). Godwin subsequently undermines the idea that the
individual is capable of functioning as its own, autonomous archē: ―man is in no case
strictly speaking the beginner of any event or series of events that takes place in the
universe‖ and cannot be ―a cause of that paramount description, as to supersede all
necessities.‖ Thus, Godwin admits that although the mind is a ―proper antecedent, it is in
no case a first cause‖ (PJ 1:385-6, 420).39 These ―methods of operation‖ remain largely
inscrutable for consciousness, such that the volition normally conceived as the product of
a rational will seems ―accidental‖ rather than essential: ―volition is the accidental, and by
no means the necessary concomitant, even of those thoughts which are most active and
efficient in the producing of motion. It is therefore no more to be wondered at that the
mind should be busied in the composition of books, which it appears to read, than that a
train of thoughts of any other kind should pass through it, without a consciousness of its
being the author‖ (PJ 1:420).
Godwin here touches upon the vertiginous sense of a self that is largely unaware
of itself, a self besieged by a delirium of unconscious traces capable of interrupting and
intersecting with consciousness at any moment. Godwin begins to see consciousness as
―supplemental‖ to the anarchy of subconscious processes that compose it, appearing as a
39
In 1793 and 1796, Godwin had written that the mind functions as an ―efficient cause,‖ which he then
replaces with the more Humean ―antecedent‖ in 1798 (3:174). Priestley suggests that Godwin eventually
moves away from a deterministic stance towards a conception of free will. However, Godwin clearly
rejects free will on multiple occasions. Even in the later Thoughts on Man where Godwin claims that free
will might constitute ―the most important chapter‖ in the ―science of man,‖ he still identifies it as a
―delusive sense‖ that is, at best, socially pragmatic but by no means grounded in the ―essence‖ of man (231,
239). In the final instance, Godwin states that he remains ―persuaded . . . that the phenomena of mind are
governed by laws altogether inevitable as the laws of matter‖ (232).
50
kind of island floating in a delirious sea of memories, sensory traces, and random
associations that, because the mind is ―always thinking‖ (PJ 1:414), constantly threaten
to overwhelm the dictates of the understanding:
One impression after another is perpetually effaced from this intellectual register.
Some of them may with great attention and effort be revived; others obtrude
themselves uncalled for; and a third sort are perhaps out of the reach of any power
of thought to reproduce. . . . If the succession of thought be so inexpressibly rapid,
may they not pass over some topics with so delicate a touch so as to elude the
supplement of consciousness? (PJ 1: 411-2).
Godwin does recognize something of this anarchē of consciousness in the first edition of
Political Justice when he acknowledges that there may exist alongside ―the most
methodical series of perceptions . . . going on in the mind, . . . another set of perceptions,
or rather many sets playing an under or intermediate part; and, though these perpetually
modify each other, yet the manner in which it is done is in an eminent degree minute and
unobserved‖ (PJ 3:174). However, this insight is tempered by the absence of the majority
of his discussion of epistemology in the expanded fourth chapter in Book 1 for the 1796
and 1798 editions to account for his reading of Hume‘s Treatise.40 The 1793 version thus
sees Godwin downplay the an-archic conception of a mind composed out of the
interference of multiple ―sets‖ of perceptions by introducing it as something that
―deserves to be remarked[,] by the way‖ (PJ 3:174), but not expanded upon or
supplemented by an epistemology that largely remains assumed rather than examined in
detail. It is not until the second and third editions that Godwin more obviously broaches
the anxious acknowledgement that the constant ―effacement‖ of the innumerable traces of
experience and memory within our ―intellectual register‖ suggests the persistence of an
elusive and deeply contingent activity capable of intruding upon, and grafting its own
ends onto, the ostensibly placid surface of rational consciousness.
40
See note 25, above.
51
2.3 Perfectibility and/as Potentiality
The broader consequences of this epistemological skepticism for Godwin‘s anarchism
and his theories of perfectibility and justice are significant. On the one hand, Godwin
argues that the ―universe‖ is in flux, but a flux mechanically disciplined in the form of a
linear and teleological course of constant improvement in which mankind is perfected
―through various stages of folly and mistake‖ (PJ 1:151). Yet, if both mind and matter
are infinitely divisible, neither prepossessed nor preformed and therefore open to
perpetual revision and modification, Godwin opens the possibility of reading
perfectibility and justice beyond their roles as ―archaic‖ determinants as particularly
utopian forms of potentiality or, as Godwin puts it, as ―tendency‖ or ―capacity‖ (PJ 1:85).
As Rajan remarks, potentiality or capacity is not ―inevitably progress, but the possibility
opened by the persistence of utopian desire across the impossibility of confirming spirit‘s
hope for a teleological progression‖ (―Spirit‘s Psychoanalysis‖ 190).
The ―incessant industry‖ by which perfectibility deconstructs the ―resting places‖
of the mind exposes a tenuous homology between its own striving and the groundless
flux of a necessity permeating all of nature that potentially alienates progress from itself.
Despite his belief in progress, Godwin also skeptically observes that ―the human species
seems to be but, as it were, of yesterday. Will it continue for ever? The globe we inhabit
bears strong marks of convulsion, such as the teachers of religion, and the professors of
natural philosophy, agree to predict, will one day destroy the inhabitants of the earth.
Vicissitude therefore, rather than unbounded progress, appears to be the characteristic of
nature‖ (PJ 1:453).41 Historical necessity, as an unlikely convergence of natural
41
Godwin‘s reflection on vicissitude is coupled with some suggestively critical remarks against
philosophical ―optimism,‖ which form part of a chapter added in 1796 (―Of Good and Evil‖) that replaces
the original Book 4 Chapter 9, ―Of the Tendency of Virtue.‖ In the latter Godwin had argued, following his
rejection of the Hobbesian principle of self-interest in the previous chapter (also omitted from the second
and third editions of PJ), that virtue ―consists in seeing every thing in its true light, and estimating every
thing at its intrinsic value‖ such that ―even bodily pain loses much of its sting, when it is encountered by a
chearful [sic], a composed, and a determined spirit‖ (PJ 3:321-22). In the second and third editions,
Godwin replaced his earlier chapter with a more cautious reply to those (including himself, perhaps) who
would derive overly optimistic consequences from the tendencies of virtue and perfectibility, stressing not
only their radical uncertainty and rarity, but also anticipating something of Schopenhauer‘s pessimistic
necessitarianism: ―It may be worthy of remark, that the support the system of optimism derives from the
52
philosophy and religion, here appears as something more an-archic, an excessive and
indifferent agency of ―vicissitude‖ rather than progress. If necessity requires that
everything is connected with everything else, then the character of man cannot be
fundamentally different from that of nature; that is to say, Godwin could not adhere to the
doctrine of necessity if only ―man‖ is progressive, while nature is not. However, if
―vicissitude‖ is the character of nature, then progress itself may be nothing more than an
imaginary hypothesis. Godwin‘s shifting view of natural history as vicissitude thus
pushes the goals of progress and reason further out of historical necessity and into the
―abstruse‖ realm of speculation. Indeed, Godwin suggests that the very definition of
perfectibility attests to an analysis interminable in which archē dissolves into the
evanescent nothingness of an ever-receding horizon: ―in many cases the lines, which
appear to prescribe a term to our efforts, will, like the mists that arise from a lake, retire
further and further, the more closely we endeavour to approach them‖ (PJ 1:92).
Moreover, the etymology of the term ―vicissitude‖ itself in the Latin vicissim, meaning
―turn, change,‖ suggests the incursion of a non-linear view of time that frustrates the
teleological definition of perfectibility. If both psychic and natural history are
characterized less by the calm fluctuations of gradual, logical progression, than by an anarchic and discontinuous incursion of events, vicissitudinal turns, convulsions, or
―revolutions‖ – a term popular with Godwin‘s literary protagonists – then the future
cannot be determined in advance.
In the same vein, because Godwin rejects pre-formation as a kind of institution,
one might see perfectibility as analogically closer to epigenesis, which describes the
progressive development of an embryo out of the amorphous flux of an egg cell, or in
Godwin‘s proto-Lockean terms, the emergence of the mind from its originary state as ―an
doctrine of necessity, is of a very equivocal nature. . . . [T]he rashness of the optimist will appear
particularly glaring, while we recollect the vast portion of pain and calamity that is to be found in the world
. . . All nature swarms with life. This may, in one view, afford an idea of an extensive theatre of pleasure.
But unfortunately, every animal preys upon his fellow. Every animal, however minute, has a curious and
subtle structure, rendering him susceptible . . . of piercing anguish. We cannot move our foot, without
becoming the means of destruction. . . . It may be said, with little license of phraseology, that all nature
suffers‖ (PJ 1:457).
53
unfinished sketch‖ through a process of infinite division and self-differentiation (PJ
1:36). Epigenesis inscribes a development and a potentiality that can only be unfolded in
and as experimentation, what Deleuze defines as the contingent ―self-movement and
becoming-other‖ of the empirical subject (Empiricism 85). Similarly, for Godwin,
perfectibility advances with ―a rapidity and firmness of progression of which we are, at
present, unable to conceive the idea‖ (PJ 2:486-7); that is, perfectibility unfolds without a
concrete sense of the changes it wants, as the contingent working-through of ideas not yet
―instituted,‖ since one cannot tell until ―after the experiment, how eminent any individual
may be‖ (PJ 1:215). Hence, Godwin writes, ―that of which I am capable . . . as to my
conduct today,‖
falls extremely short of that of which I am capable as to my conduct in the two or
three next ensuing years. For what I shall do today I am dependent upon my
ignorance in some things, my want of practice in others, and the erroneous habits I
may in any respect have contracted. But many of these disadvantages may be
superseded, when the question is respecting what I shall produce in the two or three
next years of my life. Nor is this all. Even my capacity of today is in a great degree
determinable by the motives that shall excite me. When a man is placed in
circumstances of a very strong and impressive nature, he is frequently found to
possess or instantaneously to acquire capacities which neither he nor his neighbours
previously suspected. (PJ 1:151)
Though Godwin often frames reason‘s potential within an enlightened optimism about
the future, he also gestures to a more uncertain potential in referring to unknown
―capacities‖ that arise ―when a man is placed in circumstances of a very strong and
impressive nature.‖ Similarly, Godwin elsewhere writes that ―capacity‖ functions in two
senses: first, in a quasi-Aristotelian, instrumentalized sense of a form that can be brought
out of a certain substance and the use to which this form is applied: ―Thus a given portion
of metal, may be formed, at the pleasure of the manufacturer, into various implements‖
(PJ 1:150). When Godwin refers to capacity in human nature, however, it becomes ―a
subject attended with greater ambiguity,‖ since ―it is easier to define . . . the permanent
qualities, of an individual knife, for example, than of an individual man‖ (PJ 1:151). We
54
cannot know our ―capacities‖ in advance of the experiment, and experimentation subjects
perfectibility to an ―unlimited dissemination‖ that exposes ―progress‖ to contingency:
―the seeds of virtue may appear to perish before they germinate‖ (PJ 1:151, 1:452,
3:289).
Nonetheless, because these seeds only ―appear‖ to perish, Godwin also implies that
their loss is never absolute; rather, potentials continue as latencies capable of being
realized ―at some future period‖ (PJ 1:220). Nor does Godwin‘s reference to ―seeds‖ of
possibilities buried within the self and society42 simply re-inscribe a romantic or
organicist ideology that has recourse to a pre-formative rhetoric in which the possible
takes precedence over the real or the historical. As Priestley points out in his Critical
Notes to the third edition of Political Justice, Godwin later appears to reverse his attitude
towards pre-formation in Thoughts on Man, arguing that ―every child that is born, has
within him a concealed magazine of excellence.‖ Yet, Godwin also goes on to say that
although these seeds of ―excellence‖ are ―all there,‖ they remain ―folded up and
confused‖ and cannot be appealed to in the manner of a grounding principle, an identity
or ―essence‖ (PJ 3:118; Thoughts on Man 270). As ―confused,‖ such potentials are both
irreducibly non-simple and call for their own epigenesis through experimentation, such
that their outcomes always remain uncertain and open to different articulations. This
acknowledgement complicates Godwin‘s prior confidence, reflected in a passage from
1793 subsequently omitted from the revised versions of the text, that ―if the embryo
sentiment at present existing in my mind be true . . . it will not fail to shew itself‖ (PJ
3:160). Conversely, in the revised versions of the text, Godwin appears more aware of the
contingency of such improvement, that the unfolding and effects of this embryonic truth
are not guaranteed.
In this sense, perfectibility can be seen as having a ―reflective‖ rather than
determinant value, in Kant‘s sense of a mode of judgment ―compelled to ascend from the
particular in nature to the universal,‖ and which an-archically ―stands in need of a
42
See especially Shelley‘s well-known metaphor of the ―future contained within the present, as the seed
within the plant‖ in his ―Defence of Poetry‖ (Shelley‟s Poetry and Prose 481).
55
principle‖ (Critique of Judgment 15-6). Godwin will therefore draw a distinction between
determinant practices such as Law and more reflective notions of justice:
In defiance of the great principle of natural philosophy, that there are not so much
as two atoms of matter of the same form through the whole universe, [law]
endeavours to reduce the actions of men, which are composed of a thousand
evanescent elements, to one standard. . . . If, on the contrary, justice be a result
flowing from the contemplation of all the circumstances of each individual case . . .
the inevitable consequence is that the more we have of justice, the more we shall
have of truth‖; ―no two crimes were ever alike, and therefore the reducing them,
explicitly or implicitly, to general classes, which the very idea of example implies,
is absurd. (PJ 2:403-4, 347)
Godwin draws out this reflective rather than determinate model of judgment from what
he calls the ―great principle of natural philosophy‖ first asserted by Leibniz,43 the identity
of indiscernibles. Briefly, the principle of indiscernibles states that no two distinct
substances exactly resemble each other or have exactly the same properties. In Thoughts
on Man, Godwin explicitly invokes Leibniz on this point: ―How many men now exist on
the face of the earth? Yet, if all these were brought together, and if, in addition to this, we
could call up all the men that ever lived, it may be doubted, whether any two could be
found so much alike, that a clear-sighted and acute observer might not surely distinguish
the one from the other. Leibnitz [sic] informs us, that no two leaves of a tree exist in the
most spacious garden, that, upon examination, could be pronounced perfectly similar‖
(198).
The principle of indiscernibles posits that every individual entity has within itself
an interior ―seed‖ of difference that comprises the singularity and irreducibility of the
―case.‖ Conversely, Godwin perceives Law as a ―theoretical‖ discourse that effaces
indiscernibles in that it collects ―the circumstances of a certain set of cases, and
arrange[s] them‖ and consequently ―leaves out such as are particular‖ (PJ 1:343). Law
43
See ―Discourse on Metaphysics‖ in G.W. Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters (1969), 308.
56
unfolds through what Foucault calls a ―homogenous space of orderable identities and
differences‖ that excludes or marginalizes that which cannot be codified ―within a
taxonomic area‖ or a generic structure (Order of Things 292, 137). Through its potential
both to introduce new epistemic material and to ―diversify‖ prior knowledge, since
according to Godwin every new idea that ―offers itself to the mind is modified by all the
ideas that ever existed in it‖ (PJ 1:114), justice‘s concern for the singular opens it to
constant revision and supplementation: ―In practice . . . those circumstances inevitably
arise which are necessarily omitted in the general process: they cause the phenomenon, in
various ways, to include features which were not in the prediction, and to be diversified
in those that were‖ (PJ 1:344).
In this respect, Chaplin points out that Political Justice begins to approximate a
deconstructive approach to justice. Godwin‘s conceptualization of a justice that is at once
situated ―beyond‖ law and focused on the singular anticipates a deconstructive approach
in which Derrida similarly distinguishes between law as the mere ―general application of
a rule‖ and justice as the encounter with an ―event‖ that, insofar as it cannot be grasped a
priori, ―exceeds calculation, rules, programs, anticipations‖ (Derrida, ―Force of Law‖
27). In order to account for the particularity effaced by law, justice cannot itself be
―grasped‖ or represented since it would then become law. Rather, as Newman argues, this
deconstructive sense of justice can be called an-archic not because it names a principle
above all other principles, but because it ―functions as an open, empty signifier: its
meaning or content is not predetermined‖ (128). For both Godwin and post-anarchist
theory, justice approaches political and legal discourse from a perspective that exposes
their groundlessness in order to stress the way that these discourses remain open to
perpetual reinterpretation. The ―omnipotence of truth‖ and the universality of justice are
thus predicated on the quasi-transcendental ―impossibility‖ of its own omnipotence and
universality. Truth does not bring an end to progress, but rather produces further
differentiations, suggesting an infinite process of supplementation: ―there is no science
that is not capable of additions‖ (PJ 1:119). Perfectibility might then be understood less
in a teleological sense than as a process of reflective judgment in which ―additions which
never reach a total and subtractions whose remainder is never fixed‖ (Deleuze, Dialogues
II 55). Despite Godwin‘s mention of an ―omnipotence‖ of truth, the very logic of
57
perfectibility implies that there is never a universal truth as such, only what Deleuze calls
―heterogeneous processes of rationalization, which are very different depending on the
different domains, epochs, groups and people. They never stop aborting, sliding, getting
into impasses, but also pulling themselves together elsewhere, with new measures, new
rhythms, new attitudes‖ (158). The only event or experience that would be capable of
validating a principle of universal justice would be the future, which is precisely what
remains unknown.
If Godwin‘s skeptical epistemology renders the foundational rationality and
omnipotent truth at the basis of classical anarchism untenable, perfectibility and justice
offer the possibility of thinking beyond the ―present‖ that prevents this skepticism from
becoming self-consuming. Godwin puts his empiricism to the task of a more speculative
enquiry that corresponds to perfectibility as a politics without finality. Thus, in an
important revision added to the 1798 edition of the text, Godwin qualifies his earlier
confidence concerning the proto-romantic definition of ―truth‖ as a vatic power capable
of conceiving ―all things, past, present, and to come, as links of an indissoluble chain‖44
and as enabling the rational subject ―to surmount the tumult of passion‖ and ―reflect upon
the moral concerns of mankind with the same clearness of perception, the same firmness
of judgment, and the same constancy of temper, as we are accustomed to do upon the
truths of geometry‖ (PJ 1:396). In 1798, however, Godwin adds a paragraph immediately
following this statement that exemplifies his growing skepticism and an awareness that
such powers are, at best, are ―temporary‖ and can never therefore reach any kind of
closure that is not immediately subject to critique (PJ 1:396). ―A sound philosophy may
afford us intervals of entire tranquility,‖ Godwin writes, ―but the essence of the human
mind will remain. Man is the creature of habit; and it is impossible for him to lose those
things which afforded him a series of pleasurable sensations, without finding his thoughts
in some degree unhinged, and being obliged . . . to seek, in paths untried, and in new
44
What Godwin identifies with ―truth‖ in this instance begins to approximate conventional representations
of the visionary Romantic imagination and the ―Great Chain of Being.‖ Compare, for instance, Blake‘s
description of the Bard in his introductory poem to Songs of Experience (1794) ―Who sees Present, Past, &
Future‖ (E 18).
58
associations, a substitute for the benefits of which he has been deprived‖ (PJ 1:396).45 In
short, in 1798 Godwin radically diminishes reason‘s capacities in favour of a more
skeptical acknowledgment that the mind‘s ―essence‖ is not the ―uncontaminated point of
departure‖ that will become important for classical theorists of anarchism. Instead,
Godwin acknowledges the possibility that the mind‘s ―progress‖ is always potentially
self-sabotaging. Thus, Godwin jeopardizes any sense of perfectibility as teleology, since
the establishment of new ―truths‖ incites the construction of new conventions that would
in turn call for their own deconstruction. Reason may never achieve the disinterested
tranquility that Godwin calls the ―perfectly voluntary state‖ in which ―we may finally
obtain an empire over every articulation of our frame‖ (PJ 2:520). Progress can never
entirely sublimate its own vicissitudes: taken to the end of its own suppositions,
perfectibility must be both self-revising and self-critical. Perfectibility is, in this sense, a
thought driven by its own insufficiency.
Even within the more skeptical terms of the revised editions to Political Justice, the
anarchē within the self-revising and self-critical role of perfectibility and justice remains
largely implicit rather than explicit. Again and again, Godwin returns to an orthodox
Enlightenment rhetoric that circumscribes his anarchism as the desire to substitute
traditional forms of authority with the authority of rationality or truth. It will be within
the domain of fiction that Godwin will excavate and explore the more an-archic
potentials within the Protean ―system‖ of Political Justice. However, over the course of
his revisions to the text, Godwin also invests rationality with an authority that can no
longer be justified within the context of its own epistemological suppositions. At the
same time, it is precisely reason‘s groundlessness that engenders the need for perpetual
self-revision, and opens a path to reinterpret and extend perfectibility and justice beyond
themselves so as to signify an an-archic potential that questions things as they are, as an
exposure to that which cannot be determined in advance, or the very opening of a space
for what might yet be possible.
45
See PJ 3:172.
59
60
Chapter 3
3
The History of an Error we call Truth: Caleb Williams
―In appearance, or rather, according to the mask it bears, historical consciousness is
neutral, devoid of passions, and committed solely to truth. But if it examines itself and if,
more generally, it interrogates the various forms of scientific consciousness in its history,
it finds that all these forms and transformations are aspects of the will to knowledge:
instinct, passion, the inquisitor‟s devotion.‖
- Foucault, ―Nietzsche, Genealogy, History‖
In Political Justice, Godwin expresses the standard of an ―omnipotent truth‖ of rational
justice and an emphasis on the particular that renders this truth only the truth of its
potential for de-standardization or revision. Revision and re-thinking being their own
modes of ―progress,‖ perfectibility aims at releasing knowledge from fixed institutional
forms by following particulars experimentally, without fully anticipating where they
might lead. Although Godwin attempts to protect perfectibility‘s capacity for
interminable revision from self-revision, his own revisions to the 1793 version of
Political Justice begin to move away from the conception of reason as an ―independent
principle‖ or archē, unsettling the possibility of an uncontaminated point of departure
from which classical anarchism derives authoritative notions of resistance to institution,
and from which it unfolds a rectilinear, teleological version of history.
Godwin‘s emergent circumspection with respect to omnipotent truth as the ground of
a rational anarchism is intensified with the publication of his first novel, Things as they
Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794). Published almost immediately
following the first edition of Political Justice, the novel‘s plot revolves around the
eponymous Caleb, a lower-class orphan who begins to suspect that his well-regarded
benefactor Ferdinando Falkland once committed murder. When Falkland discovers
Caleb‘s suspicions, he confesses the murder and forces Caleb to remain in his service
under the threat of severe punishment. Chafing under Falkland‘s constant surveillance,
Caleb secretly departs for London, but is forced to return to defend himself against
61
trumped-up charges of theft. Failing to convince the court of his innocence, Caleb is
imprisoned but eventually escapes, temporarily joining a band of robbers before going
into hiding. Despite attempts to leave his past behind, Caleb finds himself relentlessly
pursued by Gines, a spy under Falkland‘s employ, as well as finding himself the subject
of infamy in broadsides relating stories of ―the notorious housebreaker, Kit Williams‖
(CW 330). Deprived of his identity and any chance at a peaceful existence, Caleb finally
returns to confront Falkland and, in the first version of the ending, again fails to establish
his innocence, is imprisoned, poisoned, and goes mad. Godwin, however, in his revised
conclusion for the published version of the novel, invents a scene in which Caleb and
Falkland appear reconciled through a mutual admission of guilt. Moved by the image of
his destitute master, Caleb recants his accusation against Falkland and turns it against
himself, which in turn prompts Falkland to publicly confess his crimes. Ostensibly more
hopeful than the Gothic histrionics of Godwin‘s original ending, the published conclusion
posits interminable guilt as the price for Caleb‘s ―victory‖ over his master.
As Kristen Leaver points out, critical approaches to Caleb Williams are
predominantly oriented around Godwin‘s own differing appraisals of the novel‘s purpose
(589). In his first preface to the novel, originally withdrawn by the publisher for its
overtly Jacobin implications, Godwin states that the purpose of Caleb Williams is to
reinforce the teachings of Political Justice: ―what is now presented to the public is no
refined and abstract speculation. . . . It is now known to philosophers, that the spirit and
character of the government intrudes itself into every rank of society. But this is a truth
highly worthy to be communicated to persons whom books of philosophy and science are
never likely to reach‖ (CW 55). Godwin‘s detailed descriptions of prisons, class
prejudice, and the corruptions of the court-system convey much of Political Justice‘s
examination ―into the extent of the influence that is to be ascribed to political
institutions‖ (PJ 1:2). Thus, earlier critics often read the novel, to use David
McCracken‘s words, as a ―means of propaganda‖ for Godwin‘s political theories (131).46
46
Along with the studies by Woodcock, Kelly, and Myers cited in the previous chapter, one can also cite
Graham (1990), and Bode (1990) as examples of readings that follow McCracken‘s sense that Caleb
Williams explicates the basic principles of Political Justice.
62
Implicitly or explicitly, such readings typically assume that the relatively unselfconscious
rationalism of the first version of Political Justice to be a text consistent with itself, thus
locating Caleb Williams within the horizon of a classical anarchism that ―sees humanity
as oppressed by state power, yet uncontaminated by it‖ (Newman 5).
In his later recollection of Caleb Williams‘ composition in his 1832 preface to the
―Standard Novels‖ edition of Fleetwood (1809), however, Godwin suggestively indicates
that the novel is not only an examination of social institutions, but an ―analysis of the
private and internal operations of the mind,‖ a ―tracing and laying bare [of] the
involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses‖ influencing
his characters (―Preface to Fleetwood (1832)‖ 448).47 Incorporating Godwin‘s later focus
on the psychological aspects of the novel, other critics have variously identified Caleb‘s
unreliability as a narrator, his paranoia, and evident persecution-complex as revealing the
extent to which Godwin‘s novel can be understood more reflexively as an ―internal
critique of [Godwin‘s] own political theory‖ that ―led him to complicate his rationalist
model of political justice‖ (Handwerk, ―Of Caleb‘s Guilt‖ 940).48 Such critical
perspectives read Caleb Williams in ways that come closer to post-anarchism‘s
acknowledgment that classical anarchism‘s desire for an ―essential, moral, and rational
subjectivity supposedly uncontaminated by power is contaminated, indeed, constituted by
the power it seeks to overthrow,‖ and therefore ―constitutes, in itself, through its
essentialist and universalist premises, a discourse of domination‖ (Newman 5).
47
Parenthetical citations from Godwin‘s Preface to Fleetwood refer to Appendix A of Handwerk and
Markley‘s edition of Caleb Williams (2000), 443-9.
48
For Collings, Caleb‘s often pathological behaviour suggests that the novel ―reveals the necessary
impasses‖ of Political Justice‘s ―attempt to hurl humanity into a space beyond historical determination‖ by
appealing to a principle of ―absolute reason‖ (―The Romance of the Impossible‖ 849). Reading Caleb
Williams in the context of impersonal narrative techniques in realist prose fiction, John Bender similarly
argues that the novel undermines the assumptions of Godwin‘s anarchism by re-staging the ―dominant
behavioral ideology . . . of post-Enlightenment culture‖ as implicated within the ―system of domination‖ it
claims to reject (114). See also Rothstein (1975). Psychoanalytic interpretations of Godwin‘s first novel
have also played a prominent role in complicating or challenging earlier interpretations of Caleb Williams‘
relation to Political Justice. See Storch (1967), Gold Jr. (1977), and Corber (1990). Storch argues that the
novel details Caleb‘s dangerously neurotic projection of his Calvinist guilt onto Falkland, who serves as a
stand-in for God. Gold Jr. and Corber respectively locate the megalomaniacal dimension in Caleb‘s search
for truth by associating it with Freudian ideas of paranoia, fixation and repressed homosexuality. For a
broader discussion of Caleb Williams in the context of a history of ideas that sees Romanticism as the
troubled site of the ―invention‖ of psychoanalytic concepts, such as transference and the talking-cure, see
Faflak (2005).
63
Following the insights of the latter critics, this chapter suggests that Caleb Williams
shows Godwin to be his own best critic in deploying a skepticism towards the possibility
of Enlightenment that unworks the more classically anarchistic formulations in his first
version of Political Justice. However, if Caleb Williams cannot be said to simply iterate
the overt goals of Political Justice, the former also does not simply dismantle the latter.
Insofar as the previous chapter makes the case that Political Justice gradually becomes
more or less implicitly engaged in its own self-questioning, Caleb Williams renders this
questioning explicit by deploying the fictive model of romance as a laboratory for
political ideas that remain to be fully worked-through or subjected to experimentation and
proof. In this respect, Caleb Williams might be seen as a ―supplement‖ to the first edition
of Political Justice, in which those ideas ―worthy to be communicated to persons whom
books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach‖ can achieve this
communication only through a fictive medium that places those ideas in question. On the
one hand, the novel produces a thoroughgoing critique of the ideological foundations of
the ancien régime, demonstrating the legitimizing relationship between ―error‖ and
―superstition‖ that constitutes the arbitrary power of institution. On the other hand, if, as
Godwin‘s subsequent revisions to Political Justice suggest, rational consciousness
presupposes a chaotic and inchoate (un)ground, in which the motives permeating ―every
single action . . . are innumerable‖ and ―so entangled . . . subtle and variously
compounded, that the truth cannot be told,‖ the Protestant thematics of self-examination
that drives Caleb‘s narrative can no longer disclose an essential core of truth that would
serve as a prelude to a rational ―anarchism‖ (PJ 1:155; Enquirer 289).
Godwin‘s emphasis on the need to revise our perspectives on the past in Caleb
Williams echoes the ―history of political institutions‖ and the an-archic a priori of
political subjectivity that makes up the early chapters of the 1798 edition of Political
Justice. There, Godwin suggests that the project of historical perfectibility cannot begin
without returning to the foundations of things as they are and revealing the repressed
despotisms within the past, just as the project of rational perfectibility cannot begin
without confronting the an-archic, empirical a priori of thought. With Caleb Williams,
Godwin‘s combined analysis of the ground of institution and political subjectivity
discloses that any such return to foundations broaches the (im)possibility of constituting
64
an archē from which political justice could establish a stable point of reference that
would ground history as progressive movement towards Enlightenment. Rather, this
search for foundations reveals the Protean complexity and subtlety of underlying
motivations in which ―truth‖ can only appear, to use Foucault‘s terms, as ―an ‗invention‘
behind which lies something completely different from itself: the play of instincts,
impulses, desires, fear, and the will to appropriate‖ (―Nietzsche, Genealogy, History‖
163-4).
This chapter proceeds first by examining the ways in which Godwin both formally
and thematically situates Caleb Williams as an analysis of origins, paying specific
attention to his decision to sketch the novel from back to front. On the surface, Godwin‘s
reverse-engineering of Caleb Williams from ―ultimate conclusion‖ to ―first
commencement‖ (446) exposes the irrational ―anarchy‖ through which institutions
legitimize their existence – particularly, the sublime violence that underwrites Falkland‘s
peremptory dedication to the chivalric code. Moreover, Godwin/Caleb‘s shared narrative
technique aims to provide the novel itself with a thematic unity in which the
misrepresentations of the past are eventually cleared up, in accordance with the more
teleological arguments of the first edition of Political Justice. Godwin‘s retrospective
approach to narrative is internally mirrored in Caleb‘s desire to uncover Falkland‘s guilty
secrets and recover his own innocence, reflecting a mutual need for the revelatory
discovery of a truth in the past that will serve as the ground for an ―enlightened‖ future.
I then consider how Godwin/Caleb‘s return to the foundations of things as they are
nonetheless discloses ambiguities that put the truth of its own archē under erasure.
Focusing in particular on the unsettled ground of Caleb‘s anxious ―curiosity‖ that
circumscribes his pretension to inhabit an impartial, rational point of departure, the
novel‘s analysis of institutions becomes a dialectic of enlightenment in which the
progressive illumination of the truth appears coextensive with the very structures of
institution that it aims to disavow. The search for foundations turns back on itself and
becomes a ―genealogy‖ of anarchism‘s morals, disclosing the radically ambivalent
motives subtending Caleb‘s Promethean quest for justice. Caleb Williams might then be
considered more deconstructively an-archic insofar as it thinks ―in a most faithful,
65
interior way – the structured genealogy‖ of Godwin‘s own presuppositions concerning
political justice, ―but at the same time determine[s] . . . what this history has been able to
dissimulate or forbid, making itself into a history by means of this somewhere motivated
repression‖ (Derrida, Positions 6).
The closing section of this chapter discusses how this genealogy of classical
anarchism avant la lettre generates aporias that cause Godwin to revise his earlier
conclusion to the novel. I situate the differences between Godwin‘s two endings as a shift
from the more ―negative‖ anarchy of the first ending towards an idea of ―responsible
anarchy,‖ that is, an anarchy that acknowledges that its foundations are not absolute.49
Rather than completely undermining Godwinian anarchism, responsible anarchy
supplements and extends the idea of perfectibility as a radical model of interminable
questioning. I argue that the unforeseeable moment in which Caleb sympathizes with the
destitution of his former master less recapitulates the idea of impartiality in Political
Justice than it gestures towards what Emmanuel Lévinas calls the ―irreducible anarchy of
responsibility for another,‖ a responsibility that cannot therefore be thought within the
context of a foundational rationality (54).
3.1 The (Im)pure Principles of Ancient Gallantry
In both form and content, Caleb Williams is a novel concerned with archē. Formally,
Godwin signals this concern in his decision to sketch the novel in reverse order: ―I felt
that I had a great advantage in thus carrying back my invention from the ultimate
conclusion to the first commencement of the train of adventures upon which I purposed
to employ my pen.‖ The advantage in ―carrying back my invention,‖ Godwin avers in his
later Preface to Fleetwood, is that ―an entire unity of plot would be the infallible result;
and the unity of spirit and interest in a tale truly considered gives it a powerful hold on
the reader‖ (446). Proceeding from the telos of an ―ultimate conclusion‖ to the archē of a
―first commencement,‖ Godwin asserts a rigorous form of authorial control and thematic
49
The term ―responsible anarchy‖ originates with John Caputo (1988), who uses it to describe the ethical
possibilities opened by Derridean deconstruction. Post-anarchists, such as Newman, have also appropriated
this term. See also Newman, 126-7.
66
unity that adapts several eighteenth-century literary conventions and genres – in
particular, those associated with the Gothic and the Sentimental novel as well as
narratives of religious persecution50 – for a radical, ―epochal‖ effect: ―When I had
determined on the main purpose of my story, it was ever my method to get about me any
productions of former authors that seemed to bear on the subject. I never entertained the
fear, that in this way of proceeding I should be in danger of servilely copying my
predecessors. . . . I said to myself a thousand times, ‗I will write a tale that shall constitute
an epoch in the mind of the reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be exactly
the same‘‖ (―Preface to Fleetwood (1832)‖ 448, 447). Godwin situates his text as
epistemologically ―revolutionary,‖ both in the sense of an epochal break with the past and
a movement of return that not only describes Godwin‘s compositional approach but also
orients the perspective of his protagonist. As Caleb remarks from the outset, the purpose
of his narrative is to trace ―the state of [his] passions in their progressive career‖ by
working back to the ―circumstances‖ that ―influenced the history of [his] future life‖ (CW
59). In the process, Godwin/Caleb aims to make visible ―what sort of evils are entailed
upon mankind by society as it is at present constituted‖ (―Preface to Fleetwood (1832)‖
409).
Godwin and his protagonist likewise share in a certain Jacobin rhetoric that aims to
dissolve what Paine had identified with ―the manuscript assumed authority of the dead,‖
the archival/textual authority of past traditions (42). In placing what is to be resolved
first, Godwin‘s concern is not only to generate an accurate description of ―things as they
are,‖ but also to trace how things came to be as they are through an investigation of their
50
Wehrs, for example, sees Caleb Williams as both a response to and a subversion of the novels of Fielding
and Richardson. According to Wehrs, Godwin‘s desire to represent ―things as they are‖ aims to carry
through the exposure of social corruption that punctuates eighteenth-century novels, without their tendency
to reintroduce a ―providential guidance or moral logic‖ (500). Morse (1982) also sees Caleb Williams as the
culmination of a series of Gothic ―social novels,‖ including Radcliffe‘s Mysteries of Udolpho, Charlotte
Smith‘s Emmeline, Bage‘s Hermsprong, and Holcroft‘s Hugh Trevor, that make use of Gothic conventions
to invent a ―prolonged demonstration of the perversity of human nature as a result of the conditioning
processes of culture‖ (24, see also 41-9). Botting (1996) also points to Godwin‘s use of Gothic conventions
as a means of undercutting the conservatism inherent in earlier examples of the genre (93-8). For more
detailed discussions of the textual sources of Caleb Williams, including Godwin‘s use of tales of religious
persecution such as ―The Adventures of Mademoiselle de St. Phale‖ and stories of prisoners from the
Annual Register and the Newgate Calendar see Kelly, 179-208; and Hogle, 263-9.
67
ground, such that the novel becomes a process of complicating what had previously
appeared simple through its deconstruction. This gestures to Godwin‘s sense of
perfectibility as a process of continually going-back to question the ―resting places‖ by
which one would act ―today conformably to the determination of yesterday‖ (PJ 1:65).
However, if the philosophical focus of Political Justice is predominantly forwardlooking, Caleb Williams traces the emergence of institutions in the present through their
conditions of possibility, inscribing things as they are within a reflexive process that
seeks to account for, rather than simply posit, itself. This process of ungrounding the
stability of ―today‖ by analyzing its determination by the archived authority of
―yesterday‖ moves the recursive narrative structure of Caleb Williams in the direction of
what Foucault calls ―problematization,‖ an ―analysis of the way an unproblematic field of
experience, or set of practices, which were accepted without question, which were
familiar and ‗silent,‘ out of discussion, becomes a problem . . . and induces a crisis in the
previously silent behaviour, habits, practices, and institutions‖ (Fearless Speech 74).
Much of Caleb Williams is concerned with the problematization of a specific form of
institution, namely, the aristocratic model of social power manifest in the code of
chivalry. Falkland‘s infatuation with the ―heroic poets of Italy‖ and his ―temper
perpetually alive to the sentiments of birth and honour‖ constitute a fascination that
precipitates his disastrous encounter with the despotic Tyrrel (CW 67).51 For Burke, the
chivalric code is exemplary of that inherited ―system of opinion and sentiment‖ under
threat by the ―new conquering empire of light and reason.‖ In an attempt to posit chivalry
as one of the traditions necessary for maintaining the social bond, Burke uses a language
that replicates the logic of archē: chivalry is a ―principle, though varied in its appearance
by the varying state of human affairs,‖ that has ―subsisted and influenced through a long
succession of generations even to the time we live in‖ (Burke 238). As a grounding
principle that would remain stable beneath the varied surfaces of its contingent historical
51
Boulton (1958) goes as far to suggest that Falkland may even be a representation of Burke himself although this overlooks the fact that Burke himself was not actually an aristocrat, see 227-28. For further
discussions of Godwin‘s engagement with chivalry see Brewer (1999); Butler (1982); Dart (1999), 76-98.
68
manifestations, chivalry provides the archaic foundation upon which the glorious
―character‖ of early modern Europe subsists throughout ―all its forms of government.‖
Yet, Burke also acknowledges that the chivalric archē is not foundational as such, but
rather a ―pleasing illusion‖ that betrays a darker reality that the chivalric code at once
acknowledges and disavows. In Burke‘s estimation, the palpable advantage of chivalry
lies in its capacity to soften the brute exercise of force into ―fealty‖: ―Without force, or
opposition, [chivalry] subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to
submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to
elegance‖ and ―to be subdued by manners‖ (239). Fealty obtained through ―manners‖
catalyzes an exchange of loyalties that defers violence and maintains social order through
the observance of hierarchical distinctions and the sanctioned legal authority of the state.
Chivalry expresses ―that dignified obedience‖ and ―subordination of the heart‖ required
by fealty in order to convert the sublime violence of power into a mutually humanizing
and civilizing ―beauty.‖ As William R. Musgrave points out, chivalry‘s ―highly
aestheticized code of manners . . . serves . . . to palliate the awesome terror of the
sublime, thereby enabling the social order to exist‖ (13). Burke further invests the
palliating force of chivalry with archaic force by inscribing it within a political theology
that, in order to suppress social violence, asserts a divine ―law of laws‖ and ―sovereign of
sovereigns‖ through which ―corporate fealty and homage‖ are founded as virtues worthy
of ―universal praise‖ (Burke 262). Any society that abjures the divinity sanctioned
through tradition and chivalry inevitably reverts to ―anarchy‖ and barbarism. Burke‘s
paramount example of such an instance is, of course, the anarchy set loose by the French
Revolution: ―now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power
gentle, and obedience liberal, and harmonized all the different shades of life . . . are to be
dissolved. . . . All decent drapery is to be torn off‖ (239).
In Caleb Williams, the conflict between Falkland and Tyrrel represents what Burke
sees at stake in the code of chivalry. Described as a ―wild beast,‖ ―tyrannical to his
inferiors,‖ ―unrelenting, and abrupt,‖ Tyrrel embodies that ―fierceness of pride and
power‖ that Burke identified as needing to be mitigated by chivalric ideals (CW 75, 77,
79). Conversely, Falkland‘s ―polished manners‖ are ―peculiarly in harmony with
69
feminine delicacy,‖ and his possession of a ―mysterious sort of divinity annexed to the
person of a true knight‖ manifests the highly aestheticized code of manners associated
with Burkean chivalry (CW 77, 166). As Caleb informs us through the servant Collins,
Falkland‘s adherence to the chivalric code prevents a duel with the jealous Count
Malvesi, while his later attempts to save Emily and the farmer Hawkins from Tyrrel‘s
persecution as well as smooth over the differences between the two squires, seeks a
means of alleviating social violence by ―softening‖ Tyrrel‘s despotic tendencies: ―By
quarreling we shall but imitate the great mass of mankind . . . let us do better. Let us
show that we have the magnanimity to contemn petty misunderstandings. . . . [B]y mutual
forbearance, let us preserve mutual peace‖ (89-90).
Godwin likewise frames the conclusion of Falkland‘s narrative as providing a story of
foundations that would justify the legitimacy and permanence of chivalric ideals. When
Tyrrel is found murdered, suspicion naturally falls onto Falkland who, just prior to the
discovery of Tyrrel‘s body, suffers a humiliating public beating at the hands of his rival.
In an attempt to salvage his reputation as a ―man of the purest honour‖ (172), Falkland
delivers an impassioned speech in his own defense that sees him acquitted of any
wrongdoing: ―it seemed as if a public examination upon a criminal charge, which had
hitherto been considered in every event as a brand of disgrace, was converted, in the
present instance, into an occasion of enthusiastic adoration and unexampled honour‖
(173). The conversion of ―disgrace‖ into ―unexampled honour‖ gestures to what Collings
calls the ―principle of convertibility‖ that mutually informs Burke‘s ideas on chivalry and
his theory of the sublime. Both chivalry and the sublime function according to a principle
of conversion ―whereby violence is transformed into a gift: the sublime transforms an
apparently physical threat into a moving grandeur, suspending mere terror in aesthetic
delight‖ (Monstrous Society 66).
Moreover, for Burke, the conversion of an experience of sublime terror into aesthetic
delight occurs through a social, communal affect through which one feels sympathy for
the sublime suffering of an individual: ―The delight we have in such things, hinders us
from shunning scenes of misery; and the pain we feel, promotes us to relieve ourselves in
relieving those who suffer‖ (Enquiry into the Origin 46). In his depiction of Falkland‘s
70
acquittal, Godwin renders explicit the social effects of Burke‘s principle of convertibility
and sublime sympathy. The moving grandeur of Falkland‘s speech converts the physical
horror of murder and criminal disgrace into a moment of ―rapturous delight‖ (CW 173)
that sees the role of the victim/sufferer transferred from Tyrrel to Falkland. Not only does
Falkland suffer the slings and arrows of an accusation that threatens to tarnish his
reputation, Tyrrel‘s premature death renders ―the lustration which the laws of knighterrantry prescribe . . . impossible‖ (166-7). The scene culminates in a moment of
sympathetic sublimity through which murder is converted into reconstituted social
cohesion: ―a sort of sympathetic feeling that took hold upon all ranks and degrees‖ (173).
It is precisely such ―acquittals‖ of past institutions that Godwin is keen to
problematize by exposing the violence at the site of their positing. As Falkland‘s
―librarian as well as secretary‖ and erstwhile interpreter of the ―errors‖ and ―discoveries‖
within ―the plans of different authors,‖ Caleb is at once an archivist and, as Rajan points
out, deeply engaged in hermeneutic processes that enjoin the reader to see the story of
Falkland‘s past as a text whose authority can be deconstructed (CW 62; Rajan, ―Godwin
and Wollstonecraft‖ 239). ―At present,‖ Caleb writes, ―I was satisfied with thus
considering every incident [of Falkland's past] in its obvious sense. But the story I had
heard was for ever in my thoughts, and I was peculiarly interested to comprehend its full
import‖ (CW 179). Going beyond the ―obvious sense‖ of Falkland‘s text, Caleb seeks to
uncover the gaps within Falkland‘s narrative and, by extension, unmask the false textual
authority of institutions whose canonization depends on the repression of the irrational
violence implicit in their founding gestures. Caleb thus resolves to become ―watchful,
inquisitive, suspicious, full of a thousand conjectures as to the meaning of the most
indifferent actions‖ of his master, actions that begin to take on the status of signs
―pregnant‖ with meaning (198-9): ―I examined [the story of Falkland‘s past] in every
point of view. In this original communication it appeared sufficiently distinct and
satisfactory; but as I brooded over it, it gradually became mysterious‖ (212, 60, 179-80).
71
In this context, Falkland‘s past begins to appear as a palimpsest, a textual surface
covering over a prior text whose traces are capable of unsettling this surface.52
Traces of this prior ―text‖ appear within the details of Falkland‘s narrative and point
to the unsettling discovery that chivalry is less antithetical to the exercise of brute power
than mutually implicated with it. More specifically, Godwin internalizes the dichotomy
of chivalry and barbarism in order to turn it against itself: chivalry‘s desire to distinguish
itself from the violence it claims to prevent transforms this violence into its repressed,
―anarchic‖ ground. As Collings points out, Burke‘s association of chivalry with
metaphors of veiling and illusion invokes a ―figural instability that makes it impossible to
separate high and low, sacred and profane, permanent and transitory in the way that he
would wish.‖ As pleasant illusion, chivalry does not abolish the brute exercise of force so
much as disguise it: ―beneath its gentle and lovely forms lies the unlovely reality not only
of human vulnerability and anxiety but also of unadorned kingly power, which is merely
‗mitigated‘ by deference. Chivalry lends a certain air to brute force, but it does not
actually modify it‖ (Collings, Monstrous Society 60, 69).
Focusing on the figural instability inherent in Burke‘s argument, Godwin carries out
the implications of a chivalry that paradoxically claims the status of archē while
admitting to its own illusoriness. By assimilating the Burkean opposition of chivalry and
barbarism into a distinction between surface and repressed depth, Godwin (via Caleb)
undermines the legitimacy of institution by exposing its irrational underside. This figural
instability can be discerned as a latency within the details of Falkland‘s past. Even while
managing to defer a violent encounter with Malvesi, Falkland reminds the latter that his
―temper is not less impetuous and fiery‖ than that of his competitor, ―and it is not at all
times that [he] should have been thus able to subdue it‖ (CW 72). Likewise, upon
learning that he has failed to protect Emily from Tyrrel‘s persecution, culminating in the
former's premature death, Falkland admits that his ―notions of virtue and honour . . .
could not prevent [him] from reproaching the system of nature, for having given birth to
such a monster as Tyrrel. He was ashamed of himself for wearing the same form‖ (157).
52
See Spivak‘s preface to Derrida‘s Of Grammatology, lxxvi.
72
The context of this passage suggests that Falkland‘s ―shame‖ applies to the human
species; however, one can also read Falkland‘s ignominy as symptomatic of a deeper
anxiety in which the difference between Falkland and Tyrrel has been interiorized as a
distinction between a pleasant chivalric ―surface‖ and an aggressive, Tyrrel-like ―depth‖
within Falkland himself, such that the two squires could be said to constitute two
dimensions of the same ―form.‖
Godwin further hints at this repressed violence by pointing to an unsettling dichotomy
within the chivalric code itself, a duplicity in which the ―pure principles of ancient
gallantry‖ are contaminated by their opposite. In his description of Falkland‘s youth,
Collins remarks that ―young men of rank divide themselves into two classes – those who
adhere to the pure principles of ancient gallantry, and those who, being actuated by the
same acute sense of injury and insult, accustom themselves to the employment of hired
bravoes as their instruments of vengeance. The whole difference, indeed, consists in the
precarious application of a generally received distinction‖ (68). Collins suggests that
Falkland‘s ―undaunted spirit and resolute temper‖ places him firmly on the side of ―pure
gallantry‖ (72). Nonetheless, the very distinction between two ―classes‖ of chivalry
points to a heteronomy that casts doubt on Falkland‘s claims for chivalry‘s purity as
anything more than pleasing illusion. The opposition between good and bad forms of
chivalry already implies an impurity within the chivalric code, since Falkland assumes
the sanctity of a distinction that is at best ―precarious,‖ always potentially menaced by its
own repressed violence. Seemingly posed as antithetical to one another, the two classes
of chivalry represented by Falkland and Tyrrel share the ―same acute sense‖ of insult,
suggesting that the distinction between chivalry and mercenary revenge is one of degree
rather than kind, so that Burke‘s view of chivalry as a pleasing illusion becomes a means
of sentimentalizing chivalry as archē in order to avoid the darker connotations with
which it is intimately connected. The unsettling proximity of chivalry to its anarchic
―other‖ is specifically noticed by the poet Clare who, on his deathbed, warns Falkland of
his ―impetuosity‖ (94).
The repressed violence at the heart of the chivalric code also shifts the meaning of the
sympathetic sublimity that allows Falkland to be acquitted of murder. Rereading this
73
moment in light of Falkland‘s later confession to having murdered Tyrrel, the sublime
spectacle of Falkland‘s defense generates a moment of sympathetic identification that
works to reestablish the values already sanctioned within an existing group identity. As
Jacques Khalip comments, Burke‘s model of the sympathetic sublime ―coordinates
spectators to experience its otherness as a quality that is intrinsic to the hygienic and
aesthetic necessity of those practices in the first place.‖ Hence, ―although seemingly more
vulnerable‖ to the experience of suffering, sympathetic sublimity serves to coordinate
subjectivity ―with the normative values of a particular group . . . one that is justified by
mass violence or other traumatically sublime moments‖ (107, 108). The self-consciously
aestheticized and sentimental structure of Falkland‘s past that hides an irrational core of
unadorned violence recalls Godwin‘s image of a history that ―labours under the Gothic
and unintelligible burden‖ of past institutions in Political Justice (PJ 2:101). Godwin‘s
reference to the Gothic highlights how the chivalric code betrays its own status as a
pleasant symbolic fiction ordained by divine decree through an effacement of the anarchy
that sustains it. Hence, after Caleb draws out a confession that reveals Falkland as a
murderer, Godwin turns the Burkean principle of convertibility against its own
foundations by showing Falkland‘s conversion from a ―beneficent divinity‖ (217) into the
repressed Gothic underside of a divine violence: ―You little suspect the extent of my
power. . . . You might as well think of escaping from the power of the omnipresent God
as from mine!‖ (225).
As the Gothic embodiment of institution‘s claim to possess an ―insurmountable
power‖ (235), Caleb observes that Falkland has become a ―copy of what monarchs are‖
(261). As such, Falkland comes to personify institution as a system of mutually
reinforcing religious, economic, psychological and judicial discourses whose
hierarchization of social reality allows aristocratic power to maintain its dominance
through the illusion of permanence. As Falkland informs Caleb: ―I wear an armour,
against which all your weapons are impotent‖ (235). Godwin shows that the conventions
that grant Falkland his unimpeachable social status determine what counts as ―truth‖
within things as they are. The opposition between the ―pure principles‖ of chivalry and
anarchy deploys certain ―rites of purification and exclusion‖ that grant chivalry the status
of something given, so that any questioning of chivalry itself can only be understood as
74
―monstrous‖ and must therefore be silenced or confined to preserve the integrity of the
social bond (Foucault, Madness and Civilization 3, 10). As Falkland warns Caleb, ―call
as loud as you will, no man on earth shall hear your cries; prepare a tale however
plausible, or however true, the whole world shall execrate you for an impostor‖ (235).
In the second and third volumes of the novel, Godwin demonstrates the extent to
which institutions are capable of deploying such repressive distinctions, providing an
extended meditation on the consequences of exposing the secret violence at the heart of
instituted power. After drawing a confession of murder from Falkland, Caleb must ―attest
every sacrament, divine and human, never to disclose‖ his knowledge (214). Forced to
remain within Falkland‘s employ and placed under constant surveillance, the price of
Caleb‘s desire to ―gratify a foolishly inquisitive humour‖ (215) is, initially, silence: ―I
was his prisoner. . . . All my actions observed; all my gestures marked. I could move
neither to the right nor the left, but the eye of my keeper was upon me. . . . I withdrew in
silence‖ (224-5). However, Caleb‘s subsequent attempts to quit Falkland‘s estate, first by
appealing to Falkland‘s seemingly benevolent brother-in-law Forester, and then by
escaping to London, subject him to more overt forms of institutional repression. After
departing for London, Caleb is called back to Falkland‘s estate on false charges of theft.
Despite appealing to an idea of impartial justice that looks beyond the prejudices of
instituted law and arguing that Falkland had planted the evidence against him, the judge
Forester finds Caleb guilty and sentences him to prison. Explaining his verdict, Forester
reiterates the chivalric binary that relegates any refusal to conform to ―established
boundaries of obligation‖ (217) as something monstrous that, like Burke‘s histrionic
descriptions of the French Revolution, threatens to destroy the very fabric of society:
―Vile calumniator! you are the abhorrence of nature, the opprobrium of the human
species, and the earth can only be freed from an insupportable burthen by your being
exterminated!‖ (256, 258).
Caleb‘s failed appeal to a justice capable of ―defeating by a plain unvarnished tale all
the stratagems of Vice‖ (243), along with Forester‘s sense that the monstrosity of Caleb‘s
crime is not his ―dishonesty‖ but his impertinence in bringing an accusation against his
social betters, suggests that it is not enough to speak truth within the current state of
75
things as they are. Rather, adapting Foucault‘s terminology, the subject has to be ―within
the truth‖ (dans le vrai) – that is to say, capable of speaking from within the instituted
system of conventions that determine what can be identified as ―truth,‖ innocence, and
guilt in one‘s own time (Archaeology 224). By invoking Political Justice‘s notion of
impartial justice as a principle that transcends ―the ground of real difference‖ between ―a
man of rank and fortune‖ and ―a poor country lad‖ (CW 255), Caleb places himself in a
theoretical perspective that is not ―within the truth‖ of things as they are and, as such, can
only be recognized as radically transgressive and inhuman: ―pursued by a train of ill
fortune, I could no longer consider myself as a member of society. I was a solitary being,
cut off from the expectation of sympathy, kindness, and the good-will of mankind‖ (343).
As Foucault makes clear in Madness and Civilization, one of the consequences of not
speaking ―within the truth‖ of one‘s time is that the subject is placed, voluntarily or
involuntarily, alongside other social outcasts who have been relegated to the status of
non-beings subjected to the constraints of institutional power: criminals, the insane,
social and racial minorities (Foucault 10). Taking on the Protean status of prisoner,
refugee, temporary companion to a band of virtuous thieves (306-28), as well as
disguising himself as both an Irish (333-5) and a Jewish peasant (352-63), Caleb appears
emblematic of the violent exclusionary processes that Godwin sees as part of the legacy
of institution. Of these excluded groups, Godwin redeploys the increasingly popular
Gothic trope of the robber-band as the literary representation of a certain anarchism,
whose determined struggle against instituted power for the good of humanity sees them
defined as criminals.53 As the robbers‘ spokesman Captain Raymond remarks, ―we, who
are thieves without licence [sic], are at open war with another set of men who are thieves
according to law. . . . A thief is, of course, a man living among his equals‖ (307).
Occupying the ground of a justice beyond law, Godwin‘s thieves represent the embryonic
possibility of a utopian existence without institution based upon virtue, equality and
53
The model for the virtuous outlaw in Gothic fiction seems to have been Schiller‘s Karl Moor, the
protagonist of his 1781 play Die Räuber (translated into English as The Robbers in 1792), a text with which
Godwin was familiar. See the entry for Schiller under 26 February 1795 in Godwin‘s diary. For a broader
discussion of the novel of banditry (Räuberroman) as one of the primary genres of early European Gothic
fiction, see Murphy (1935).
76
mutual benevolence, an idea Shelley later picks up for his fragment ―The Assassins‖
(1814).54
However, Godwin also points to the severe limitations of this form of classical
anarchism. While throwing into relief the injustice by which institutions criminalize
whomever might disagree with them, Caleb also acknowledges that the ―uncommon
energy, ingenuity, and fortitude‖ of the group is ultimately ―thrown away upon purposes
diametrically at war with the first interests of human society‖ (319). Similarly, for Caleb,
to expose the secret at the heart of institution is to risk a double-bind that, in either
direction, culminates in alienation: either one is silenced within an actual institution such
as the prison, or one remains free of institutions but is forced to lead a ―counterfeit‖
existence as a criminal, ―for the purpose of eluding the inexorable animosity and
unfeeling tyranny of [our] fellow man‖ (333).
3.2 A Fatal Impulse
Despite the overall sense of hopelessness in Caleb‘s narrative, his experience of the
palpable horrors of institution rests upon the conviction that his vigilant dedication to a
quasi-transcendental ―truth‖ will convert the injustices of the present into a future justice.
Caleb‘s role as a reader who seeks to discredit the aesthetic ideologies of the ancien
régime allows Godwin to inscribe ―a model of reading as the unearthing of truth and the
correction of past (mis)representations‖ (Rajan, ―Wollstonecraft and Godwin‖ 241). Yet,
insofar as this model of reading sees institution as a kind of ―illusion,‖ Godwin and
Caleb‘s mutual desire to desublimate the ―romance‖ of chivalry also engenders the very
logic of sublimation that it wants to renounce, aestheticizing anarchism as a truth
uncontaminated by power. Caleb wants to counter the irrational history of political
institutions with a redemptive, teleological vision of history in which obstacles that
54
Like Godwin‘s virtuous thieves, Shelley‘s ―Assassins‖ refers not to a group of professional murderers but
to a small ―congregation of Christians‖ who, ―acknowledging no laws but those of God . . . modeled their
conduct towards their fellow men by the conduct of their individual judgment,‖ displaying an anarchistic
―contempt for human institutions‖ (254). Shelley‘s story introduces a mysterious figure of a ―Wandering
Jew‖ who, not unlike Caleb, threatens to collapse the utopian existence of the group. The fragment has
been reprinted as Appendix A in Berendt‘s edition of Shelley‘s early Gothic novels Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne
(2002), 253-70.
77
appear insurmountable in the present are rationalized and overcome: ―I am incited to the
penning of these memoirs only by . . . a faint idea‖ that ―posterity may . . . be induced to
render me a justice which my contemporaries refuse. . . . [U]ltimately mistakes will be
cleared up, justice done, and the true state of things come to light, in spite of the false
colours that may for a time obscure it‖ (59, 192).
This redemptive or ―divinatory‖ model of reading (Rajan, ―Wollstonecraft and
Godwin‖ 245) is mirrored in Godwin‘s suggestion that planning the novel from
conclusion to commencement will create a unified plot, as well as in Caleb‘s selfdescribed ―mechanical turn‖ as a ―natural philosopher‖ who ―could not rest till [he] had
acquainted himself with the solutions that had been invented for the phenomena of the
universe‖ (CW 60). By ―collecting the scattered incidents of [his] history‖ and annexing
―to appearances explanations which [he] was far from possessing at the time‖ (194),
Caleb aims to rearrange the past into a coherent, linear plot in which ―one sentiment
flows, by necessity of nature, into another sentiment of the same general character‖ (212),
thereby granting his memoirs a ―consistency which is seldom attendant but upon truth‖
(59). In this context, what Godwin identifies as the novel‘s ―analysis of the private and
internal operations of the mind‖ follows a more classical idea of analysis as a process in
which discontinuities are ―rearranged, reduced, effaced in order to reveal [their]
continuity‖ (Foucault, Archaeology 8). Beginning from its ending and retracing this
ending back to its foundations, the novel presents itself in the form of a hermeneutic
circle55 that both confers direction and meaning on events while simultaneously claiming
to reveal an ―original figure‖ always already immanent to these events. As such, Caleb
suggests that the archiving of his own past will confirm an anthropology of reason‘s
progress by vindicating his blasted reputation: ―these papers shall preserve the truth; they
shall one day be published, and then the world shall do justice on us both [Falkland and
Caleb]‖ (421).
55
See also Rajan (1990), which expands her prior discussion of Caleb Williams in ―Wollstonecraft and
Godwin.‖ In the former work, Rajan places the novel within the broader romantic context by connecting it
with Schleiermacher‘s idea of hermeneutics as a form of ―divinatory‖ reading. See also Pfau (2006): ―as
Godwin‘s retrospective account suggests, all detail in Caleb Williams must be subordinated to the novel‘s
overall purpose and design‖ (134).
78
Caleb‘s mixed rhetoric of hermeneutic uncovering and polemic overcoming
demonstrates Foucault‘s sense that traditional models of historical continuity ―provide a
privileged shelter for the sovereignty of consciousness. Continuous history is the
indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that
everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will
disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity‖ (Archaeology of Knowledge
12). Caleb‘s identification with the natural philosopher claims the archaic status of an
uncontaminated point of departure, an impartial, neutral observer ―with total neglect of
the suggestions of self-regard‖ (427). ―Draw[ing] . . . from the stores of [his] own mind,‖
Caleb sees himself as a sovereign cogito that is ―sufficiently contemplative‖ and ―master
of itself,‖ even at the price of radical alienation (271, 274). In turn, Caleb perceives
justice not simply as something excluded from the conventions of the present, but as an
―eternal truth,‖ an ―unalterable equity‖ that recalls Political Justice‘s sense of justice as
an ―unquestionable‖ quasi-transcendental principle (CW 353, 173; PJ 1:146).
Nonetheless, this unquestionable rule shows itself to be less beyond institution
than an alternative form of power that sees Caleb assert those binary distinctions that
come to be identified with classical versions of anarchism. Caleb thus posits the selfmastery of his own ―simple . . . nature‖ over against the illusory, ―artificial society‖ of
institution, while equally emphasizing a rigid moral binary in which ―innocence and guilt
are the most opposite to each other. I would not suffer myself to believe, that the former
could be confounded with the latter‖ (273, 243). Yet, by inscribing Caleb as a
representation of political justice within a narrative whose very analytic draws the reader
towards a questioning of foundations, Godwin invites us to see through Caleb‘s desire to
plot a history that adequately communicates an inscrutable principle of rational justice, or
what Rajan calls a ―substantialist ontology of the text‖ that would locate a transcendental
signified of truth (―Wollstonecraft and Godwin‖ 239).
This conception of justice as a transcendental signified begins to unravel in
moments where Godwin exposes not only the violence of institution, but also the
profoundly ambiguous, non-rational and imaginary (un)ground of any anarchist politics
that would claim the archē of a ―truth‖ excepted from power. Formally, the recursive
79
structure of Godwin‘s narrative already points to the tenuousness of its foundations, since
recursiveness presupposes a compositional principle that interiorizes a gap between
existential ―fact‖ and narrative ―value.‖ As Hume had argued, because the causal
relationship between facts is supplied by the mind rather than objectively existent, the
continuity of phenomena can only occur retroactively as a process of ―narrative
composition.‖56 Narrative composition, according to Hume, names the process by which
the mind makes use of the associative principle of causality as ―the most usual species of
connection‖ through which ―the historian traces the series of actions according to their
natural order, remounts to their secret springs and principles, and delineates their most
remote consequences‖ (Enquiry 103). The more causal associations are established
between disordered experiential data, the more ―lively‖ the idea becomes for the subject.
The livelier the idea, the more ―reality‖ it has for the subject as a reasonable belief.
Like personal identity, however, the continuity of events is the product of the
imagination rather than the disclosure of an objectively verifiable truth. The ―natural
order‖ of which Hume speaks is always already a kind of artifice in which, as Deleuze
points out, ―I confer to the object more coherence and regularity than I find in my
perception.‖ From a Humean perspective, ―there is no complete system, synthesis, or
cosmology‖ – or, in Godwin‘s terms, any ―unified plot‖ – ―that is not imaginary.‖ Insofar
as fiction is constitutive of human nature, Hume inscribes an irreducible aporia in which
the imagination uses the very principles that would discipline it in order to transcend its
own limits: ―to oppose its own nature and to allow its fancies to be deployed has become
the nature of the mind‖ (Empiricism 78, 83-4). Because narrative composition
presupposes the absence of any underlying substance or transcendent archē, there are no
absolute criteria by which one can definitively separate ―reasonable belief‖ from
delusion. Rather, as Jeffrey Bell states of Hume, ―the excesses of delusion, the tendencies
that may very well undermine and transform one‘s reasonable beliefs into fits of
56
See also Pfau (2006), 128-33. Pfau argues that Hume‘s ―expurgation of causality from the domain of
[positive] knowledge‖ renders the ―domain of ‗literature‘ itself as an existential condition of being‖ (132).
Pfau goes on to compare the use of retroactive causation in Caleb Williams to Michael Dummett‘s
investigation of the paradox by which effects can be said to precede their causes; see Dummet (1978), 31932. For a further discussion of Hume‘s theory of ―narrative composition‖ in relation to eighteenth-century
fiction, see Christensen (1987).
80
madness, remain presupposed by these very beliefs‖ (Deleuze‟s Hume 5). In this respect,
the figural instability that characterizes the ―Gothic‖ reversal in which institution is
shown to conceal a repressed violence also infiltrates the self-privileging standpoint of
Caleb‘s dedication to a rational politics, showing this politics to presuppose the delusive
tendencies that it would externalize as forms of false consciousness.
The unsettling proximity of reason and delusion is a persistent feature of Caleb‘s
―anarchism‖ throughout the text. From the outset, Caleb states that the same curiosity that
facilitates his ―mechanical turn‖ as a natural philosopher also generates an ―invincible
attachment to books of narrative and romance‖ (60). Not unlike the shared sense of insult
that destabilizes the antithesis between chivalry and the irrational violence that chivalry
claims to disavow, Caleb reveals that his claim to an impartial, transparent scientific
knowledge is inextricably entangled with notions that characteristically resist complete
disclosure, namely, imagination and affect: ―my imagination must be excited; and when
that was not done, my curiosity was dormant‖ (60). Just as Hume suggests that a belief
becomes ―reasonable‖ through the lively association of ideas into causal chains, Caleb
―pant[s] for the unraveling of an adventure with an anxiety, perhaps almost equal to that‖
of Falkland, suggesting that Caleb‘s own analysis into the irrational ground of institution
is formulated to repeat precisely the affective and fictive character of its ―groundless‖
adversary, the romance (60). Tellingly, when Caleb is forced to take on a variety of
disguises to avoid detection in the third volume of the novel, he becomes a writer of
fiction. Even more suggestive than Caleb‘s turn to fiction is that he becomes a writer only
after a failed attempt at authoring a treatise of moral philosophy (357): fictionalizing
becomes the default means of covering over lacunae in his own moral reasoning,
exposing the unreliability in Caleb‘s systematic pursuit of justice and the unification of
his history as plot. If natural philosophy mirrors the aim and the activity of romance, and
romance as institution disguises its Gothically unintelligible origins, Caleb is ensnared in
the aporetic idea that the search for the hidden archē of things as they are proves to be the
greatest resistance to the archē of freedom and justice he seeks.
The mutually contaminating relationship between natural philosophy and romance
anticipates a process in which the novel undermines the status of a rational anarchism by
81
showing this anarchism to be a discourse that incorporates conflicting assumptions or, as
Caleb remarks, a ―contention of opposite principles‖ (198). Caleb‘s desire for romance
produces a ―magnetical sympathy‖ between himself and Falkland, such that Godwin
presents the two characters ―not simply as social antagonists but also as doubles‖ (CW
186; Rajan, Supplement 184). Just as Clare identifies Falkland as a ―fool of honour and
fame . . . who would have purchased the character of a true, gallant, and undaunted hero,
at the expense of worlds,‖ Caleb‘s curiosity demands an ―almost equal‖ display of
―insurmountable fortitude‖ that would also see him ―destined for a hero‖ (172, 385).
Romance persistently contaminates an analytic whose aim is precisely to expel
the romantic, suggesting that reason‘s desire for disenchantment contains the seed of its
own reversal. As Falkland‘s double, Caleb‘s disclosure of the sublime violence at the
basis of institution also appears as the romanticized surface of a non-rational ―curiosity‖
to which it is genetically linked: ―The spring of action which, perhaps more than any
other, characterized the whole train of my life, was curiosity. It was this that gave me my
mechanical turn‖ (60). ―Prior‖ to natural philosophy as its condition of possibility,
curiosity would appear to be the motive force necessary for a natural philosopher to
discover the ―solutions to the phenomena of the world.‖ Yet, Caleb also describes
curiosity as something more ambivalent, an inexplicable ―anxiety‖ (60), ―restless
propensity‖ (187), a ―perturbation of mind‖ (180), a ―fatal impulse that seemed destined
to hurry me to my destruction,‖ and an ―insatiable desire‖ that ―seems as if it were
capable of fully compensating any injuries that may be suffered in the career‖ (198-9).
Projecting the deceptive image of its own satisfaction, the curiosity of the natural
philosopher appears as a compensatory fiction for a latent compulsiveness that anticipates
Schopenhauer‘s will or Freud‘s death-drive, that is, an aimless, necessitarian, and
passional impetus at the heart of existence that vitiates reason‘s legitimacy as an
―independent principle.‖ This compulsiveness resituates reason‘s legitimacy not as the
―constitution and affirmation of a free subject,‖ but as Caleb‘s ―progressive enslavement‖
to the ―instinctive violence‖ of a ―rancorous will to knowledge‖ (Foucault, ―Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History‖ 163). As Caleb remarks, ―curiosity, so long as it lasted, was a
principle stronger in my bosom than even the love of independence‖ (224), suggesting
that his self-awareness is at once a belated and anxious reaction to affective sources that
82
remain an-archically prior to rational deliberation, sources that appear both hostile to and
inextricable from the very autonomy it would claim for itself.
As the ―spring‖ of Caleb‘s existence, curiosity symptomatically gestures to the
trace of a non-knowledge in the heart of knowledge, disclosing the darker side of
Godwin‘s rejection of free will in Political Justice. Such traces become evident at crucial
moments in the text in which Caleb appears subject to a ―confused apprehension‖ (188)
and ―an uncontrollable destiny‖ (208), foregrounding what Foucault calls ―the accidents .
. . the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations‖ that subtend a knowledge
that cannot ―detach itself from its empirical roots . . . to become pure speculation,‖ but
rather ―releases those elements of itself that are devoted to its [own] subversion and
destruction‖ (146, 163). One such miscalculation becomes the catalyst behind the
climactic turn in the novel in which Caleb is discovered breaking into a locked chest in
Falkland‘s private apartment in the midst of a house fire. Seized by an unknowable
―infatuation . . . too powerful to be resisted‖ (210) and describing the scene as being ―like
a dream,‖ Caleb admits that he is unable to ―account for my having plunged headlong
into an act so monstrous‖ (212). Caleb‘s subsequent attempt to rationalize his actions as
―a short-lived and passing alienation of mind‖ (211) betrays a partially acknowledged
inability to grasp his motives other than through a belated cognition that can only assert
its rational priority in hindsight. That is to say, reason appears on the scene too late to
actually corroborate an enlightened view of the subject as capable of rationally
deliberating upon and choosing between a given set of alternatives, what Godwin
previously identified with ―perfectly voluntary action‖ in Political Justice, or ―action as
proceeds from actually existing foresight and apprehended motive.‖ Rather, Caleb‘s
―fluctuating state of . . . mind‖ (198) attests to the ineluctably ―mixed‖ character of
consciousness as ―imperfectly voluntary action,‖ which ―proceeds upon a motive, out of
sight‖ (1:67). Insofar as Godwin sees voluntary actions as proceeding from feeling rather
than reason, the independence presupposed by a ―perfectly voluntary action‖ can only
ever be a retrospective narrative composition across a temporal gap that divides
consciousness from its ostensibly rational origins.
83
An acute example of such ―imperfectly voluntary action‖ appears after Caleb
analyzes Falkland‘s pained reaction while auditing a murder case apparently similar to
his encounter with Tyrrel. Observing how Falkland ―suddenly rose, and with every mark
of horror and despair rushed out of the room,‖ Caleb becomes immediately convinced of
his patron‘s guilt. Retiring into a garden, Caleb then finds himself suddenly overwhelmed
by conflicting feelings:
My mind was full, almost to bursting . . . my thoughts forced their way
spontaneously to my tongue, and I exclaimed in a fit of uncontrollable
enthusiasm, ―This is the murderer.‖ . . . I felt as if my animal system had
undergone a total revolution. My blood boiled within me. I was conscious to a
kind of a rapture for which I could not account. I was solemn, yet full of rapid
emotion, burning with indignation and energy. In the very tempest and hurricane
of the passions, I seemed to enjoy the most soul-ravishing calm. (207)
Like natural philosophy and romance, the inter-implication of opposed terms in this
passage – ―conscious‖ but unaccountable ―rapture,‖ ―burning‖ solemnity, tempestuous
calm – discloses the troubling concession of a consciousness founded upon what it is not,
and a decision as to Falkland‘s guilt that is founded by its own absence of foundations.
Moreover, Caleb‘s suggestion that his ―mind was full‖ explicitly recalls Godwin‘s
comment in Political Justice that ―the mind is always full‖ (PJ 1:408), an insight that
formed part of an empiricist epistemology in which the clear distinction of ―simple‖
concepts is the delayed resolution of an an-archic flux.
The delirious ―hurricane of passions‖ within a ―soul-ravishing calm‖ likewise
gestures to the paradoxical mixture of something libidinal in Caleb‘s adherence to a
justice that claims the status of pure reason. Thus, ―the instant‖ Caleb decides to ―place
[himself] as a watch upon [his] patron,‖ he states that he ―found a strange sort of pleasure
in it‖:
To do what is forbidden always has its charms, because we have an indistinct
apprehension of something arbitrary and tyrannical in the prohibition. To be a spy
upon Mr. Falkland! That there was danger in the employment served to give an
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alluring pungency to the choice. I remembered the stern reprimand I had received,
and his terrible looks; and the recollection gave me a kind of tingling sensation,
not altogether unallied to enjoyment. The further I advanced, the more the
sensation was irresistible. (180)
The ―strange sort of pleasure‖ that underwrites Caleb‘s sense of impartial justice
generates a dialectic that, like the uncertain boundary between chivalry and barbarism or
natural philosophy and romance, shows the antithesis between prohibition and
transgression as the projection of a single axis of mutually reinforcing terms. Caleb
implies that his transgressive desire increases in proportion to the perceived omnipotence
of the law it aims to violate, so that Caleb‘s fidelity to the truth paradoxically overlaps
with a covert dimension of guilty enjoyment.57 Insofar as this enjoyment is encrypted
within a curiosity that facilitates both natural philosophy and romance as
seeking/inventing ―solutions‖ to the ―phenomena of the world,‖ Godwin broaches the
unsettling sense that such enjoyment may not be a ―short-lived alienation of mind,‖ but
inherent within an epistemological edifice that posits a rule of absolute justice.
Various miscalculations throughout the latter volumes of the novel further subvert
Caleb‘s desire to construct a ―progressive‖ history, demonstrating how the feigned
passage between events becomes indistinguishable from a series of errors. As Caleb
remarks, if ―one sentiment flows, by necessity of nature, into another sentiment of the
same general character,‖ then an ―error, once committed, has a fascinating power, like
that ascribed to the eyes of a rattlesnake, to draw us into a second error‖ (212, 187).
While running an errand for Falkland, Caleb‘s effort to ―survey . . . the various
circumstances of [his] condition‖ finds him veering off-course towards Forester‘s estate,
which only serves to exacerbate Falkland‘s suspicion that Caleb plans to disclose his
secret (227, 231). Likewise, as Alex Gold Jr. points out, Caleb‘s constant misconstruing
57
Daffron (1995) also compares Caleb‘s perverse enjoyment to Foucault‘s idea of mutually reciprocating
―spirals of power and pleasure‖ in the first volume of his History of Sexuality. Foucault uses this spiral
imagery to thematize how the ―medicalization of sexuality‖ functions with respect to the intimate relation
between observer and observed. According to Foucault, the observer‘s power to draw out his subject‘s
sexual pleasures gives the observer a kind of pleasure; conversely, the isolation of the subject‘s sexual
pleasures also encourages these very pleasures, mingling pleasure and power in an intimate dialectic of
mutual examination.
85
of ―obvious events,‖ eventually reaches ―a state in which he interprets even the most
accidental distresses as if Falkland contrived them‖ (―It‘s Only Love‖ 149), even going
so far at one point as to grant Falkland power over nature itself. Thus, when Caleb finds
himself in the middle of a hail-storm after his failed escape to Ireland, he exclaims that
although ―there was no strict connection between these causal inconveniences and the
persecution under which I laboured . . . my distempered thoughts confounded them
together‖ (348). As Collings argues, Caleb needs to project Falkland as an omnipotent,
God-like figure in order ―to reach this state of [ethical] heroism; only if the world is a
system of total oppression can he become the singular pillar of truth‖ (―The Romance of
the Impossible‖ 859).
Caleb‘s distempered conflation of unrelated events, the inexplicable nature of his
motivations, irrational miscalculations, and paranoid sense of nature itself plotting against
him, reflects an increasingly skeptical approach to foundational models of thinking that
will appear in the revised version of Political Justice. In Caleb Williams, this skepticism
reflects a distemper in the very structure of an epistemology that can no longer separate
―within the mind, reason from its delirium, its permanent, irresistible, and universal
principles from its variable, fanciful, and irregular principles‖ (Deleuze, Empiricism 84).
This contradiction destabilizes the novel‘s more classically anarchistic claims for an
uncontaminated point of departure that sees power, error, delusion, and irrationality as
external impositions that cover over a rational essence that would redeem history as
continuity. Rather, Godwin shows the political psychology of classical anarchism to be
radically unstable, a Protean figure not only entangled in the very power-structures it
claims to abjure, but embroiled in an epistemological dilemma that sees fiction as a
principle of human knowledge that ultimately cannot be ―corrected, and even less
eliminated through reflection‖ (Deleuze 82).
86
3.3 Split-Ends: From Defeatism to “Responsible Anarchy”
The affective and imaginative anarchē that permeates Caleb‘s search for justice unsettles
the rational model of classical anarchism by re-situating it in the context of a ―poetics of
political thinking‖ that, as Davide Panagia says of Humean empiricism, ―requires the
capacity to correct or revise‖ and a ―political vocabulary that is not juridical‖ (95). The
gradually intensifying emergence of this non-juridical vocabulary throughout the novel
complicates and undermines Caleb‘s desire to compose a redemptive narrative that
clearly separates him from Falkland, innocence from guilt, truth from error, and reason
from unreason, a complication that ultimately sees Godwin revise his own conclusion to
the text. As Rajan comments, if the novel progressively deconstructs the opposition
between Falkland and Caleb, then ―an ending based on that opposition must have come to
seem a repression of the novel‘s moral complexities‖ (―Wollstonecraft and Godwin‖
240).
In Godwin‘s original ending, Caleb loses his final trial against Falkland, is
subsequently imprisoned, poisoned, and finally descends into madness. To the contrary,
Godwin‘s revised ending stages a moment in which Caleb, moved by the destitute
appearance of his master, acknowledges his own selfish motives, prompting Falkland to
finally confess his past crimes in a scene of reconciliation through an admission of
mutual guilt. Three days after this encounter, Falkland dies, and Caleb is forced to live on
as the ―devoted victim of conscious reproach‖ (429). It could be argued that the Gothic
pessimism that characterizes the novel‘s original ending might represent a more realistic
outcome in terms of Caleb‘s failed revolt against institution, and is therefore more
anarchic in its deconstruction of Enlightenment subjectivity. Donald Wehrs, for instance,
sees the sympathetic turn of the published ending as an exercise in bad faith because it
reenacts the improbable moment of spontaneous sympathizing that characterizes
Falkland‘s acquittal in the first volume of the novel. Reading Caleb Williams in the
context of eighteenth-century genre conventions, Wehrs points out that the revised ending
makes use of the narrative structure that Godwin had earlier enjoined readers to see as
false by staging the latter scene in near identical terms to those of Falkland‘s acquittal.
Just as Collins describes the conversion of Falkland‘s potential ―disgrace‖ into
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―enthusiastic adoration,‖ Caleb states that ―I came hither to curse, but I remain to bless. I
came to accuse, but am compelled to applaud. I proclaim to all the world, that Mr.
Falkland is a man worthy of affection and kindness‖ (431). Thus, despite Godwin‘s wish
to expose the ―unwillingness of eighteenth-century ‗realistic‘ fiction to trace the
‗practical effects‘ of the ‗existing constitution of society,‘‖ Wehrs argues that Godwin‘s
literary ―revolt, like Caleb‘s, never moves beyond its dependence upon what it reveals to
be duplicitous‖ (499, 500).
Yet, if Godwin‘s published ending demonstrates bad faith in its repetition of a point
of view already deconstructed earlier in the novel, then Caleb‘s final madness in the
original ending is no more ―realistic‖ than the melancholy Falkland previously deployed
as a defense mechanism to safeguard his reputation. Caleb‘s final destitution could
therefore also be interpreted as a repetition of Falkland‘s earlier romance. In this respect,
the overt Gothicism of the original ending seems calculated to have an effect similar to
that of Falkland‘s melancholy; namely, to aestheticize Caleb‘s resistance to institution
through martyrdom. The ―harmonized madness‖ that Caleb feels when he sees Falkland
serves as a ground for Caleb to affirm his earlier oppositional distinction between
innocence and guilt, as well as corroborate his ―unaltered‖ status as truth-teller: ―What a
sight was this to me? . . . it gave double vehemence to the tide of my fury. . . . I must
either suffer the penalties of a false accuser; or go on, resolute and unaltered, in the
prosecution I had begun‖ (CW 435-6). Consequently, during the first version of the trial,
Caleb remains ―perfectly self-possessed,‖ while ―[his] confidence at every instant
increased, till [he] felt all the satisfaction of undoubting certainty‖ (436).
Repositioned upon the archē of this ―undoubting certainty,‖ Collings remarks that
Godwin‘s first ending negatively validates the fantasy of Caleb‘s ethical heroism, while
simultaneously exposing ―the failure of this fantasy, its impotence in the face of what it
opposes. The novel is caught between two closed orders, tyranny and resistance, without
indicating any way beyond them‖ (―The Romance of the Impossible‖ 856). The text
underscores this sense of hopelessness by having Caleb remark that his increasing
distress proportionally restores Falkland‘s health, creating an image of a mockperfectibility in which it ―plainly appears . . . that persecution and tyranny can never die‖
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(440). Such a conclusion ironically fulfills Caleb‘s earlier desire that the memory of his
story to be ―consigned to oblivion‖ (397) in which resistance is overwhelmed by
defeatism.
If Godwin‘s first ending effects a certain closure of the text‘s desire for political
justice, the complex scene of reconciliation in the published ending signals an important
revision of Godwin‘s anarchism as well as a formal and thematic interruption of the
entropic telos of the first ending. On the one hand, Godwin‘s rewriting of the conclusion
of a text conceived from its conclusion to its originating circumstances also formally
revises and displaces his point of origin, disrupting the ―unity of plot‖ that would lead an
―ultimate conclusion‖ unproblematically back to the archē of its ―first commencement.‖
On the other hand, Godwin‘s revision presents a moment of self-critique that
approximates what Lévinas identifies as ―the irreducible anarchy of responsibility for
another‖ (76). Rather than perceive anarchism through the violent forms of political
overthrow or self-sacrifice, Lévinas associates ―anarchy‖ with an exposure to the Other
through ―proximity‖: ―[justice] derives from an anarchic signification of proximity‖ (81).
Proximity refers not to the shared space between two equivalent terms, but to an intensive
encounter in which consciousness is affected despite itself by its exposure to another as
―a contingency that excludes the [rational] a priori‖: ―Absolving himself from all
essence, all genus, all resemblance, the neighbour . . . concerns me for the first time (even
if he is an old acquaintance, an old friend, an old lover, long caught up in the fabric of my
social relations).‖ The unexpected incursion of the Other in proximity does not occur
through a process of mutual recognition that could be mediated by any predetermined
contract or exercise of autonomous ―free will‖ on the part of the rational subject. Rather,
proximity occurs directly through the passivity of sensibility and an encounter with the
―face,‖ which finds its most radical disclosure as ―nudity, non-form, abandon of self,
aging, dying‖ (Lévinas 86, 88).
Exposure to the face of the Other in proximity unravels rational intentionality through
the disclosure of a sensibility that Lévinas associates with passivity, an impoverishing of
that power for ―beginnings and principles‖ through which the subject posits itself as
archē. Lévinas therefore counter-intuitively finds ―freedom‖ on the side of passion rather
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than action, in the moment one loses the initiative that would ground the subject as a
substantial ―perseverance in Being.‖ Thus, ―anarchic liberation,‖ Lévinas writes,
―emerges, without being assumed, without turning into a beginning, in inequality with
oneself,‖ such that in its responsibility for another ―the self does not pose him/herself, but
loses its place‖ (124). Moreover, because the anarchē of responsibility dissolves the
activity of the originating subject into a radical passivity, it also disrupts the temporality
associated with the activity of consciousness and its historical self-representations, ―the
time that marks historiography, that is, the recuperable time, the recoverable time, the lost
time that can be found again,‖ or in Godwin‘s terms, the time of a historical
consciousness that eludes contingency by reassembling the past into a plot (Lévinas 36).
Not unlike Lévinas‘ description of proximity, Falkland‘s appearance in Godwin‘s
revised conclusion bears the status of a contingency that completely destabilizes Caleb‘s
rational composure: ―I can conceive of no shock greater than that I received from the
sight of Mr. Falkland‖ (426). Where the image of Falkland in the first ending causes
Caleb to reaffirm the ―undoubted certainty‖ of his moral rectitude in alienation,
Falkland‘s corpse-like appearance in the revised ending leads to an unexpected reversal
in which Caleb is exposed to Falkland in proximity, as a ―face‖ as it (barely) appears in
―aging, dying‖: ―His visage was colourless; his limbs destitute of motion, almost of life. .
. . He seemed not to have three hours to live‖ (426). The shock of this appearance of
Falkland as a ―face‖ dissolves the a priori of Caleb‘s unyielding certainty and subverts
the utilitarian calculus that would see the exposure of Falkland‘s crime as a means of
increasing the general good:
I thought I had entered coolly into the reason of the case. . . . It appeared before
my mind to be a mere piece of equity and justice, such as an impartial spectator
would desire. . . . But all these fine-spun reasonings vanished before the object
that was now presented to me. ―Shall I trample upon a man thus dreadfully
reduced? Shall I point my animosity against one, whom the system of nature has
brought down to the grave?‖ . . . It is impossible. There must have been some
dreadful mistake in the train of argument that persuaded me to be the author of
this hateful scene. (427)
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Falkland is no longer perceived as an omnipresent institutional power but rather as a
subject, a finite being also vulnerable to persecution. The image of Falkland‘s
―insensibility‖ becomes an unspoken address that summons Caleb beyond the
monological opposition between anarchism and institution and into a dialogical scene of
responsibility.
Unlike the sympathetic moment that reconstitutes the status quo and represses the
violence of institution in the first volume of the novel, the unraveling of Caleb‘s ―finespun reasonings‖ in Godwin‘s revised conclusion deconstructs the simplified opposition
between anarchism and institution and acknowledges the mutual violence of their
respective absolutism. Although Falkland praises Caleb for ―greatness and elevation of
mind‖ for justifiably exposing the crimes of the past, Caleb states that he ―records the
praises bestowed on me by Falkland, not because I deserved them, but because they serve
to aggravate the baseness of my cruelty‖ (433). Implicated in the cruelty that his view of
political justice sought to remove, Caleb finds himself incapable of simply projecting
(and expiating) the cause of his madness onto a power that invades and suppresses him
from without. Rather, the published ending sees Caleb forced to ―endure the penalty of
[his] crime‖ (433). If Caleb‘s earlier descent into psychosis reduces him to a mute
gravestone and ensures that no ―ghosts walk today,‖ his survival in the revised ending
also prolongs Falkland‘s existence as a specter of past wrongs that can neither be
completely exorcised from the present, nor entirely redeemed in the future: ―his figure is
ever in imagination before me. Waking or sleeping, I still behold him. He seems mildly to
expostulate with me for my unfeeling behaviour. . . . Alas! I am the same Caleb Williams
that, so short a time ago, boasted that, however great were the calamities I endured, I was
still innocent‖ (433).
The collapse of Caleb‘s ―innocence‖ towards the mutual responsibility of
acknowledged guilt dissolves the barrier that would preserve a space for an
uncontaminated point of departure through which anarchism might verify its moral and
rational ground. On the one hand, this leads Caleb to admit that his prior sense of acting
in accordance with an impartial principle of ―equity and justice‖ was not in fact impartial
but an ―overweening regard for self‖ (434). For Myers, this indicates a shift in moral
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perspective in which Godwin turns away from his embrace of Caleb‘s rational
subjectivity in his original ending towards a critique of this same subjectivity as ―egoistic
vindictiveness‖ in the published conclusion. As a result, Myers suggests that the
―sympathy that Caleb evinces in the sight of Falkland in the second [ending] leads to his
achievement of the primary Godwinian virtue of impartiality‖ in Political Justice (623).
Yet this would be to attribute an agency and an identity that can appear only as the
belated remainder of a consciousness that figures the impossibility of the self coinciding
with itself. For at the very moment that Caleb suggests that self-regard ―explains‖ his
errors and his actions throughout the text, his acknowledgement paradoxically forces him
to confront the dissolution of this very selfhood: ―I began these memoirs with the idea of
vindicating my character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate‖ (433-4). The
loss of character betrays Caleb‘s selfhood as the projection of an identity that falls apart
in the very moment of its positing, articulating Lévinas‘ sense that, faced with its
responsibility towards another, ―the self does not pose him/herself, but loses its place.‖
Unlike Godwin‘s first ending, Caleb‘s loss of place is, in this instance, ―not an abdication
of the self now alienated and slave to the other, but an abnegation of oneself fully
responsible for the other‖ (Lévinas 69). Caleb is called to assume a responsibility that
signals the possibility of thinking beyond the vicious cycle of law and its transgression.
Although dispossessed of his essential identity, Caleb‘s survival also allows Falkland
to survive, albeit in a different form than in Godwin‘s first ending. Where the latter
associates Falkland‘s survival and Caleb‘s madness with the interminable hypostasis of
institution, Falkland‘s spectral ―figure‖ announces a revenant whose insistent but mild
expostulations divest the novel of its ostensible return to origins. Falkland's status as a
spectre likewise contributes to this formal disruption/revision of the novel‘s sense of
closure, for, as Derrida reminds us, the spectre is that which ―returns‖ and unsettles the
recuperative model of temporality that Caleb wishes to deploy from the outset (Spectres
of Marx 39). The final haunting of Godwin‘s novel thus marks the impossibility of
returning to a conceptually solidified version of the past that would see all mistakes
cleared up. Rather, insofar as a spectre always returns, it incessantly forces us to recall
the misinterpretations, misreadings, and errors that complicate the search for foundations.
At the same time, the (re)appearance of Falkland as a revenant evokes a more an-archic
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conception of justice as ―infinite‖ responsibility which, as the revised conclusion of
Caleb Williams suggests, is a task that is only just beginning.
***
Like Political Justice, Godwin‘s revisionary approach to Caleb Williams complicates any
straightforward reading of Caleb in the terms of classical anarchism. In disclosing a nonrational desire for power at the heart of Caleb‘s ―inquisitive spirit,‖ Godwin
acknowledges a profound ambivalence haunting the ends of Enlightenment and its
confidence in the autonomous self-possessed subject as the archē of political justice. But
if perfectibility can be read more broadly as a name for the persistent necessity of
revising assumptions and a structure of consciousness whose ―Protean‖ nature leaves it
open to new discursive material, Caleb Williams also presents an important rethinking of
Godwin‘s faith in justice as reason, as well as opening a space for a history and a justice
different from a teleological view of progress that anticipates his later essay ―Of History
and Romance,‖ which is the subject of the following chapter. In particular, Godwin
advances an idea of history that would be capable of accounting for ―individuality‖
alongside a revised conception of romance. Romance becomes a means by which to
explore individuality in its historical role as a contingency that disrupts the universalizing
tendencies of eighteenth-century historiography, resituating history itself an-archically as
the ―open.‖
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Chapter 4
4
“The Falsehood of History and the Reality of Romance”:
“Of History and Romance”
“As to a great degree we may subscribe to the saying of the wise man, that „there is
nothing new under the sun,‟ so in a certain sense it may also be affirmed that nothing is
old…”(198)
- Godwin, Thoughts on Man
In Caleb Williams, Godwin‘s investigation into the irrational origins of institution yields
an increasingly reflexive meditation on the ambiguities that attend the mind that seeks to
reestablish these origins on purely rational grounds. What appears, rather, increasingly
approximates a literary genealogy that unsettles the founding presuppositions of classical
anarchism. Caleb‘s appeal to the absolute archē of a justice uncontaminated by power is
paradoxically capable of achieving its coherence only a posteriori, as a construct that
becomes indiscernible from the fictions it would disavow. Moreover, Godwin‘s
psychological analysis of his protagonist‘s motives shows how this construct points
behind the figure of the autonomous moral subject towards an an-archic (non)ground of
fluctuating motives, compulsions, and anxieties that compel this subjectivity and elude its
conscious grasp. Caleb Williams‘ revised conclusion takes this uncertainty into account
by drawing towards the idea of a more ―responsible anarchy‖ that denies the martyrdom
of Godwin‘s first ending. Formally and thematically displacing the novel‘s point of
origin, the novel‘s revised ending points beyond itself toward an anarchism whose task
has only just begun, marking the literary as the very ―place‖ of classical anarchism‘s
displacement.
This displacement calls for the complementary reconsideration of Godwin‘s prior
understanding of literature and its relationship to things as they are. The process of
writing and revising Caleb Williams shows Godwin implicitly moving towards a different
literary paradigm that will further challenge his assumptions concerning the historical
possibilities of anarchism. The collapsing distinctions between truth-falsity, innocence-
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guilt, natural philosophy-romance in Caleb Williams decisively undermine Godwin‘s
own prior distinction between ―literature‖ and ―romance‖ in the first edition of Political
Justice. Godwin had argued that literature refers not to literary fiction per se, but any
work that stimulates the ―diffusion of knowledge through the medium of discussion,
whether written or oral.‖ Literature therefore includes authors such as Newton and Locke
and is directly opposed to the ―dreams of romance.‖ Romance, in this instance, appears as
a form of false consciousness that simply distorts political realities, whereas literature‘s
purpose is to ―extirpate . . . prejudices and mistakes‖ (PJ 3:240-41). It is telling, however,
that Godwin chose to excise this discussion of literature from the revised editions of
Political Justice. Indeed, after Caleb Williams, it is no longer possible for Godwin to
maintain any simplified antithesis between Enlightenment literature and ideological
romance and, consequently, between the ―uncontaminated point of departure‖ claimed by
classical anarchism and the irrational ―fictions‖ of institution.
It is in his unpublished 1797 essay ―Of History and Romance‖ that Godwin
explicitly theorizes Caleb Williams‘ implicit deconstruction of the opposition between
literature and romance, providing a striking account of fiction‘s dialogical relationship
with history. This chapter explores this emerging dialogue as the development of a more
an-archic view of history‘s relationship to literature in Godwin that looks forward to a
post-Nietzschean historiography that Foucault names ―effective history‖ as opposed to
―traditional‖ history. For Foucault, traditional history involves ―a comprehensive view‖
of history as a ―consoling play of recognitions‖ that retraces ―the past as a patient and
continuous development,‖ the ―teleological movement‖ of man‘s progress. As argued
earlier, this teleological ―evolutionary idealism‖ also informs the pragmatic
anthropologies of anarchism in its classical forms, including Godwin‘s own original
formulations of perfectibility. ―History becomes effective,‖ on the contrary, ―to the
degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being.‖ If traditional history sees its
object as an ―ideal continuity,‖ effective history, or ―genealogy,‖ emphasizes the singular
tangles of passions, impulsions, errors, and events that traditional history obscures under
the generality or identity of the concept. Where traditional historians take ―pains to erase
the elements in their work which reveal their grounding in a particular time and place,‖
effective history affirms knowledge as perspective. Perspectivism accounts for a sense of
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historical knowledge as irreducibly interpretative: there are no historical phenomena,
only historical interpretations of phenomena. Effective history emphasizes history as an
―art‖ of interpretation, expressing a subterranean complicity between historical ―truth‖
and aesthetic invention that undermines traditional metaphysical suppositions
(―Nietzsche, Genealogy, History‖ 153-7).
This chapter contends that ―Of History and Romance‖ can be situated as a nascent
theorization of an effective history and, as such, constitutes a significant development in
Godwin‘s theory of literature and its changing relationship to both history and anarchism.
In particular, Godwin theorizes a conception of ―individual‖ history that opens a means
of reading history more an-archically as genealogy, rather than as a documentary model
of anthropological progress, an actuarial collection of facts and dates, or through the
privileged lens of the historian as impartial observer. In this respect, Godwin stages his
argument as a critique of the positivist historiographies favoured by the Scottish
Enlightenment. What Godwin understands by the ―individual‖ is not the abstract,
atomized, individual; rather, prefaced by the skeptical turn of the recently revised
Political Justice, Godwin‘s concern in ―Of History and Romance‖ lies with the ―subtle
peculiarities‖ within the fluxile ―empire of motives‖ subsisting beneath the normative
figuration of the autonomous subject (―HR‖ 458). Godwin‘s exploration of individual
history can be considered ―molecular‖ in Deleuze and Guattari‘s sense that an object is
not a self-identical substance so much as an informal composite of imperceptible
inclinations, impulses, half-formed ideas, and only partially-apprehended perceptions (A
Thousand Plateaus 213). The molecularity of the individual corresponds to a
micropolitics of history contrasted with the statistical and normative patterns that typify
what Godwin calls ―general‖ history. Individual history will draw upon connections and
disjunctions on the molecular stratum of the individual, a figure whose aims are difficult
to assimilate under a ―principle‖ that would subsume the particular into the universal. In
turn, Godwin deploys the discontinuity of the individual as a means of exploring,
primarily through the fictive medium of the romance, the conflicted substructure of a
history that can no longer be gathered into the linear, evolutionary paradigm of classical
anarchism.
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Godwin‘s ―effective‖ view of history further challenges the institutional striation
of discourses associated with positivist approaches. As Godwin argues, although the
―positive‖ methods of historiographers such as Hume and William Robertson appear to
cultivate heterogeneity through a diversity of content, they ultimately absorb the
singularity of an individual life into standardized patterns of behaviour (―HR‖ 454). Thus,
despite the fact that Godwin‘s revisions to Political Justice increasingly reflect the
influence of Humean empiricism, ―Of History and Romance‖ strives to maintain the
critical force of an empirical skepticism while resisting its tendency towards a positivistic
reification of fact. What Godwin conceives of as romance serves as an interdisciplinary
framework capable of reaffirming the singularity of the individual as a historical power,
an idea that reflects Schlegel‘s conception of romance (Roman) as the emergence of the
―new and striking‖ from ―arbitrary and strange connections‖ that fuse ―processes of
thinking, poetizing, and acting.‖ Such processes do not take a definitive ―form‖ but are
―still becoming,‖ which Schlegel understands to be the very definition of romance (32).
At the same time, Godwin shows how disciplinary transferences between history and
romance preclude relativistic approaches that would simply colonize history as literature;
rather, loosening the borders between history and romance renders their relation subject
to an interminable questioning. Godwin thus conceives of the connection between history
and romance as a kind of ―dissensus,‖ to use Bill Readings‘ term for a relation
―structured by a constitutive incompleteness‖ that ―seeks to make its heteronomy, its
differences, more complex‖ rather than subsume these differences into an overarching
identity (University in Ruins 185, 190).
In this respect, Godwin‘s sense of individual history can be read less as turning
away from the political towards more traditional ideas of romantic subjectivity58 or
pragmatic anthropology reflected in later forms of classical anarchism, than as a turning
toward the self as a radical singularity whose discovery is irreducible to substantive
notions of the in-dividual as ground. I propose that Godwin‘s sense of individual history
prefaces something of Nietzsche‘s discussions concerning individuality and its relation to
58
See, for example, Siskin (1994) especially 39-42.
97
history in his Untimely Meditations. In ―On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life,‖
Nietzsche argues that the individual as singular, unequal, and incommensurable, is a
properly historical power, since history is itself created through the incommensurability
of one moment with another: ―each one bears a productive uniqueness within himself as
the core of his being; and when he becomes conscious of this uniqueness, a strange
radiance appears around him – that of the unusual‖ (143). This individual, Werner
Hamacher suggests, is an ―unaccountable excess‖ that dissolves the determinations of the
present and opens the future as a task to be accomplished (150). Paradoxically, breaking
towards the future always involves the return of the past, not as the repetition of a former
present, but the past in its individuality, in its resistances to and within the present. As
Godwin writes, ―it is thus, and thus only that we shall be enabled to add, to the
knowledge of the past, a sagacity that can penetrate into the depths of futurity,‖ whose
depths illumine events that ―though they have never yet occurred, are within the
capacities of our nature‖ (―HR‖ 457).
Furthermore, this ―effective‖ version of history prefaced by ―Of History and
Romance‖ can also be linked back to the Deleuzian Hume invoked with reference to
Political Justice. Although appropriated by opposed philosophical traditions, both Hume
and Nietzsche share certain ―structural‖ affinities that are also discernible in Godwin,
namely, a fundamental skepticism towards abstract and foundationalist conceptions of
rationality, an emphasis on the psychological rather than the metaphysical, and an
acknowledgement of the passions as primary rather than secondary motivation for ethical
actions.59 Where Hume and Nietzsche crucially differ, however, is in their respective
approaches to history, which, as this chapter will elaborate, finds Godwin leaning more
towards a Nietzschean view that attends to the Protean historicity of individuality, rather
59
One can compare, for instance, Hume‘s emphasis on psychology over metaphysics with Nietzsche‘s
favourable description of psychology as the ―queen of the sciences.‖ See especially the conclusion to Book
I of Hume‘s Treatise, 177 and Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 24. On the comparison between Hume‘s
and Nietzsche‘s view that the passions, rather than reason, are chiefly responsible for moral distinctions,
compare Hume‘s comment in the Treatise that reason is in itself nothing but a ―calm passion‖ (530 n13)
with Nietzsche‘s remark in the Will to Power that reason is not an ―independent entity‖ but ―rather a system
of relations between various passions and desires‖ (387). For other readings comparing Hume with
Nietzsche, see Gemes (2006), 191-208; Leiter (2002); Beam (1996); and Hoy (1986), 20-38.
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than the fixed entity that Hume identifies as ―so much the same, in all times and places‖
(Enquiry 55).
The argument of this chapter follows the development of Godwin‘s essay as it
shifts from an opposition between two ―species‖ of history – general and individual – to
the complex intertwining of history and romance. Although Godwin‘s essay has been
recognized as significant by recent critics such as Klancher, as well as being reprinted in
three paperback editions of two of Godwin‘s novels, the deconstructive possibilities of
the essay‘s shifting terms have not been sufficiently addressed.60 Following the
Nietzschean orientation outlined above, I suggest that Deleuze‘s distinctive
understanding of simulacra provides one means to conceptualize the effect of Godwin‘s
shifting terminology within the essay and his negotiation with the permeable boundary at
which historical truth becomes romantic, and romance becomes historical. For simulacra,
in Deleuze‘s sense, describe a creative potential inherent in the false to overturn ideas
that have become reified as archē. Gesturing towards the role of individuality and
simulacra in history opens a means of approaching Godwin‘s historical fictions with an
eye towards a more an-archic literary paradigm, the anarchē of literature itself in its
capacity to recover dissenting, counter-factual perspectives otherwise occluded by the
static continuity of so-called ―factual‖ history.
4.1 General History, or Nothing is New Under the Sun
Godwin begins ―Of History and Romance‖ by discerning ―two principal branches‖ of
history: ―the study of mankind in a mass, of the progress, the fluctuations, the interests
and the vices of society; and the study of the individual. The history of a nation might be
written in the first of these senses, entirely in terms of abstraction and without descending
so much as to name one of those individuals of which the nation is composed‖ (453).
60
See Klancher (1998), 21-38. Klancher‘s central argument involves tracing a passage from the
necessitarian framework of Political Justice to an emerging theory of historical contingency in ―Of History
and Romance.‖ In the latter, Godwin sets aside the empirical category of the ―probable‖ for the ―possible,‖
producing what Klancher calls ―Godwin‘s reflex,‖ his ―awareness of an ‗outside‘ . . . that cannot be made
self-conscious or be incorporated into the narrative that would explain it. This reflex can be called
‗materialist‘ not because it finally grasps ‗real history‘ but because it grasps the escape of the real in even
the most self-conscious narrative ambition‖ (34).
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This first branch refers to ―general‖ history, which Godwin associates with Hume‘s
History of England (1754-62), Robertson‘s account of the reign of Charles V, Scotland,
and America (1792, 1794) and the works of Voltaire (―HR‖ 460). Hume typifies the
methodology behind the generalist approach when he famously suggests that history‘s
―chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature.‖
Once discovered, such principles show us that humanity is ―so much the same, in all
times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular‖
(Enquiry 55). Robertson‘s History of Scotland (1759) carries Hume‘s idea of universal
historical principles even further, portraying the Act of Union as a historical telos that
effectively abolishes all remaining cultural differences between England and Scotland:
―the distinctions which had subsisted for many ages gradually wear away; peculiarities
disappear; the same manner prevails in both parts of the island; the same authors are read
and admired; the same entertainments are frequented by the elegant and polite; and the
same standard of taste and of purity in language, is established‖ (313).61
With its emphasis on a ―natural‖ progression whose teleology is centered on
anthropological and civil progress and the discovery of universal constants (archai),
general history treats history as a technology, in Heidegger‘s sense of a demand that
nature – as history – ―supply energy which can be extracted and stored.‖ History becomes
a ―standing-reserve‖ from which principles of human nature are expedited, which in turn
―enframes‖ or encloses individuality according to a law of repetition and application
(Basic Writings 320-5). This approach, Godwin suggests, rests upon the abstract ―logical
deduction and calculation of probabilities‖ (―HR‖ 462).62 Probability becomes a
technology for the reduction of contingency so as to account for the ―fluctuations‖ with
which general history is concerned. Fluctuations are not, however, the ―fluxes‖ of
61
For a more detailed account of Hume and Robertson‘s contributions to nation-building and its specific
relationship to eighteenth-century philosophies of sensibility, see Gottlieb (2007), 26-60.
62
See Poovey (1998). Poovey elaborates on the development of statistical methods in relation to moral
philosophy in eighteenth century Britain can be connected to the emerging institutional model of liberal
governmentality. Such methods ―assumed that one sought knowledge about the particulars of subjectivity
in order to understand the regularities of the moral universe that underwrote (most) human beings‘
willingness to submit to government‖ (148). A similar perspective can also be found in Hacking (1990),
who traces the emergence of modern methods of ―statistical inference‖ whose ―roots . . . lie in the notion
that can improve – control – a deviant subpopulation by enumeration and classification‖ (3).
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thought intimated by Godwin‘s discussion of epistemology in Political Justice; rather,
fluctuation ―in general‖ describes the momentary absence of regularity, a permissible,
statistical variation of incidental details incorporated within a macrostructure.
Ascertaining ―the causes that operate universally upon masses of men under given
circumstances,‖ general history deploys probability as a way of describing the manner in
which details are distributed. Although mainly concerned with ―the progress and varieties
of civilization,‖ Godwin argues that general history has ―many subordinate channels into
which it has formed itself,‖ involving subjects as diverse as the ―arts of refinement and
pleasure,‖ ―the history of wealth and the history of commerce,‖ the ―progress of revenue
and the arts of taxation,‖ ―the varieties of climates,‖ ―the succession of archons and the
adjustment of olympiads,‖ as well as the ―examination of medals and coins‖ (―HR‖ 454).
To be sure, whatever is sufficiently general is capable of admitting a wide range of
empirical cases. As Deleuze points out, ―empiricists are not wrong to present general
ideas as particular ideas in themselves,‖ yet such general ideas are only particular ―as
long as they add the belief that each of these can be replaced by any other,‖ thus
abolishing individuality itself (Difference 1). Each given particular is considered formally
equivalent and therefore substitutable: the quantitative equivalence of particulars is
correlative to a qualitative order of resemblance. Hence, Godwin says that general history
emphasizes ―points of similitude‖ between cultures and discourses in tracing the
teleological ―progress of mankind from the savage to the civilized state‖ (454).
Accordingly, the general historian judges the relative progress, customs, and
―vices‖ of cultures or nations by analogy, which constitutes a fundamental element of a
logic that ties together generic and specific differences under a common identity or archē.
Synchronically, any cross-section of cultures or nations will reveal the same generic
processes. Diachronically, the present becomes an analogue of the past: ―General history
will furnish us precedents in abundance, will show us how that which happened in one
country has been repeated in another‖ (―HR‖ 456). With its focus on precedent, general
history follows the logic of a determining judgment that Political Justice had associated
with biological predetermination and law. Accordingly, Godwin writes that history
becomes the mere ―collation and comparison of successive ages‖: successive ages are
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spatially juxtaposed as simultaneous presents (454-5). The hegemonic tendencies of this
presentism are exemplary in Robertson‘s interpretation of the Act of Union, which Evan
Gottlieb identifies as a ―panegyric to assimilation‖: ―shifting verb tenses from the past to
the eternal present by the end of his first clause, Robertson‘s very grammar conveys the
idea that Britishness is both an ongoing process and an identity that has already been
achieved‖ (54).
From a theoretical perspective, the generalist dependency on analogy, presentism,
and assimilation falls into irresolvable difficulties. As Deleuze points out, generality
―must essentially relate being to particular existents, but at the same time it cannot say
what constitutes their individuality. For it retains in the particular only that which
conforms to the general‖ (Difference 38; emphasis mine). Despite the ostensible
universality of its principles, or because of them, Godwin suggests that general history is
incapable of providing ―clear ideas‖ about the difference of the particular qua individual.
Rather, generality tends towards an amorphous, formally indistinguishable, ―mass‖ of
individuals whose particularity ―is no sooner accumulated than it perishes‖ (―HR‖ 455).
If every individual case is equally exchangeable under a general archē of probability,
analogy, resemblance, and equivalence, then individual elements co-exist in a ―labyrinth
of particulars‖ that tend towards homogeneity (455). This is to say that general history is
largely indifferent to the category of the event, insofar as event signifies something new
that, in Deleuze‘s terms, creates a ―fundamental disturbance of the present‖ (Difference
38). In a similar fashion, Godwin subsequently points to the general historian‘s
―unspeakable abhorrence‖ for ―whatever would disturb by exciting our feelings the torpid
tranquility of our soul‖ (454). In his later Thoughts on Man, Godwin returns to the
themes in ―Of History and Romance‖ in an essay entitled ―Of Imitation and Invention,‖
which could be understood as an echo of the distinction between general and individual
history from the earlier, unpublished, work. Like general history, imitation operates on
the premise that there is nothing new under the sun, that ―we are all apes, fixing our eyes
upon a model, and copying him, gesture by gesture‖ (Thoughts on Man 252). General
history‘s indifference to the singular nature of the event renders it such that ―the most
calamitous, and the most stupendous scenes are nothing but an eternal and wearisome
repetition,‖ echoing Blake‘s critique of natural religion‘s sense of the universe as the
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―dull round‖ of a ―mill with complicated wheels‖ (Thoughts on Man 254; Blake, ―There
is No Natural Religion‖ E 2). Godwin‘s point is not that history ought to ignore
catastrophes, but that general history does not properly engage the calamitous, properly
an-archic, nature of events at the level of their particularity, thereby reducing both their
ethical and historical significance. The extraction of general principles from finite facts,
without recognizing that such principles are always themselves dependent and subject to
revision, leads to the claim that the knowledge of history is exhausted, or exhaustible, by
the bellwether of positive knowledge and determined in advance by what we already
know.63
For Nietzsche, such generalized representations of history demonstrate the
violence through which the ―individuality of the past‖ is ―forced into a general form and
all its sharp angles and lines broken to pieces for the sake of . . . comparison‖ (Untimely
68). General history secures the individual through its very ―de-individuation,‖ absorbing
its singularity into an ideological stereotype. Thus, Godwin notes, ―the excellence indeed
of sages, of patriots, and poets, as we find it exhibited at the period of their maturity, is
63
Further solidifying the connection to institution and assimilation, Godwin likewise emphasizes general
history‘s preoccupation with nationhood. A paradigmatic example is Hume‘s widely-read 1753 essay ―Of
National Characters,‖ in which he redeploys his earlier arguments on sympathy in the Treatise in terms of
the formation of national identities. Repeating the Treatise‘s general idea of the sympathies as a
―propensity‖ to ―receive by communication‖ the ―inclinations and sentiments‖ of another, Hume argues
that individuals demonstrate a strong ―propensity to company and society‖ in which ―like passions and
inclinations . . . run, as it were, by contagion‖ (Treatise 316; Philosophical Works 3:230). This
―propensity‖ initially takes shape in terms of local attachments and habits that, through ―contagion,‖ are
transformed into ever widening spheres of sentiments that would unite individuals into ―one political
body‖: ―their intercourse must be so frequent, for defence, commerce, and government, that, together with
the same speech or language, they must acquire a resemblance in their manners, and have a common or
national character, as well as a personal one, peculiar to each individual‖ (Philosophical Works 3:230).
While ostensibly making room for the ―personal,‖ this personality is only abstractly or formally defined in
terms of its resemblance to other individuals under the generalized template of national character. As Julia
Wright points out, the nation here functions as a related set of ideologies enforcing a ―homogenous
community‖ that ―consistently elides individuality within the category of ‗national character‘ . . . and coopts cultural work to further the national agenda rather than challenge, complicate, or supplement it‖ (Blake
xv). As Godwin remarks, because the generalist‘s ―mighty minds cannot descend to be busied about any
thing less than the condition of nations,‖ they efface the individual for the general category of national
character, restricting their view of the individual to ―the public stage‖ (454, 458). The public stage
establishes the individual within a typology of national character roughly patterned after the (neo)classical
values of the Greek paideia: poet, sage, and patriot. In a similar manner, Nietzsche writes that the historical
individual is discernible ―only under three forms of existence: as philosopher, as Saviour, and as artist‖
(―We Philologists‖ Complete Works 8:115; translation modified). Under the auspices of national character,
however, these figures become idealized social representations created to serve national interests.
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too apt to overwhelm and discourage us with its lustre‖ (456). This individual without
individuality renders the ―excellence‖64 of individuality a burden. One is at best a
secondary possessor of the excellence of poets, sages, and patriots. The consequence is
that the individual itself vanishes through the impossibility of the present ever living up
to the institutional model of the (past) individual. Discouraged by the lustre of an
institutionalized form of individuality handed down from the past, the individual can no
longer distinguish itself in the present as a historical power of future potential. We
become incapable, Godwin says, of any ―contemplation of illustrious men, such as we
find scattered through the ages‖ or the ―ascendancy of the daring and the wise over the
vulgar multitude‖: the burden of our unworthiness is too great. The individual ―sinks into
the deepest and most invariable lethargy of soul‖ since ―if he only associates, as most
individuals are destined to do, with ordinary men, he will be in danger of becoming such
as they are‖ (456-7).
4.2 Individual History, or Nothing is Old Under the Sun
Nietzsche identifies the institutional form of the individual that preoccupies the general
historian with ―a race of eunuchs‖ whose task is to ―stand guard over history to make sure
that nothing comes of it other than stories – but certainly not an event!‖ (Untimely 84).
Generality anesthetizes the an-archic force of the event in its individuality and, vice
versa, individuality itself as an event capable of unsettling the fixity, continuity, and
similitude that governs general history. Godwin thus proposes ―individual history‖ as a
second ―species‖ of history that enables ―us to view minutely and in detail what to the
uninstructed eye was too powerful to be gazed at‖ (―HR‖ 456). Individual history returns
to the site of Political Justice‘s focus on the singularity of the ―case,‖ re-invoking the
Leibnizian principle of indiscernibles and microscopic differences as the proper locus of
an-archistic thought.
64
Godwin‘s use of ―excellence‖ also gestures to Readings‘ sense of the term as an empty signifier fastened
to the techno-bureaucratization of the University: ―excellence brackets the question of value in favor of
measurement [and] replaces questions of accountability or responsibility with accounting solutions‖
(University in Ruins 119). The ―excellence‖ of the individual empties the individual of historical
value/content, establishing a neutral medium capable of translating radically different idioms into a
common principle.
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Individual history can first be described as an art of descent or de-sedimentation,
much in the sense that Foucault attributes to Nietzsche‘s use of the term Herkunft.
Nietzsche deploys the term Herkunft, Foucault explains, wherever he seeks to identify
―not the exclusive generic characteristics of an individual, a sentiment, or an idea‖ but
―the subtle, singular, and subindividual marks that might possibly intersect in them to
form a network that is difficult to unravel‖ (―Nietzsche, Genealogy, History‖ 145). In a
similar manner, Godwin wants to avoid ―the generalities of historical abstraction‖ by
arguing for an individual history capable of descending into the ―materials of which
[history] is composed,‖ in order to ―mark the operation of human passions . . . observe
the empire of motives whether groveling or elevated‖ and ―note the influence that one
human being exercises over another‖ (457). The individual, as the subsequent revisions
and extension of epistemology in Political Justice has already shown, only appears as a
unity on its surface, but is in reality an irreducible anarchē of infinitely divisible and
heterogeneous ―materials.‖ As such, Godwin resists approaching individuals as
cogwheels at the service of great moments in history that direct the vast ―machine of
society,‖ for what Deleuze calls the ―silent plurality of senses‖ that subsist within each
individual or event, a deep structure of singularity that develops in following man into his
―closet‖ (―HR‖ 456, 458; Deleuze, Nietzsche 4). Individual history is sensitive to the
internal pluralism that subtends and is capable of an-archically disturbing generalities,
opening the way for an empiricism that would be adequate to the task of historical
interpretation without (over) generalization.
Godwin‘s criticism of the Scottish historiographers constitutes the desire to
maintain a philosophical skepticism towards foundations without resorting to a positivist
version of empiricism that would lead to a restricted view of history as the exhaustive
collection of facts. Rather, Godwin replaces the naturalization of history as
anthropological progress that colours more orthodox anarchistic perspectives, with the
complex nature of an individual‘s history. Reminiscent of Blake‘s ―Auguries of
Innocence,‖ Godwin writes: ―naturalists tell us that a single grain of sand more or less on
the surface of the earth, would have altered its motion, and, in process of ages, have
diversified its events‖ (467). Godwin here iterates a certain aspect of his view of
necessity from Political Justice that ―everything in the universe is linked and united
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together. No event, however minute and imperceptible, is barren of a train of
consequences‖ (1:42). In the context of its history, necessity is less a chain of fixed laws
than a sequence of unpredictable antecedents generating uncertain outcomes. Godwin
acknowledges that minor perturbations are capable of producing macroscopic
transformations within a network of increasing complexity. If general history suggests a
global system of imitation tending towards equilibrium, individual history focuses on
local perturbations that increase the complexity, rather than the homogeneity, of the
―system of the universe.‖
The art of descent also implies the repetition of a certain ―native‖ psychology.
―The mind of man does not love abstractions,‖ writes Godwin, so individual history must
appeal to a ―genuine and native taste as it discovers itself in children and uneducated
persons‖ that ―rests entirely in individualities‖ (455). Besides Godwin‘s distinctively
romantic tropes, in the context of Political Justice the ―native taste‖ of the mind rests in
particulars because the empirical imagination is in ―perpetual flux‖ (1:35). Individual
history causes this flux to return by unworking and de-sedimenting the habits and
prepossessions that comprise the institution of the self. To return to the ―native taste‖ of
the mind does not, however, mean imitating the child or uneducated person, nor does it
require complete destruction of general principles. As Godwin states, the calculation of
probabilities serves as a ―whetstone upon which to sharpen our faculty of
discrimination,‖ developing habits and models of thought inseparable from the cultural
education of the individual (462). Individual history does not therefore reject general
principles out of hand, but serves as a means of recognizing that such principles are
limited in ways that prevent knowledge from grasping individuality. Generalities are only
capable of perceiving the historical pressures exerted by the institution on the individuals
it aims to assimilate. The individual historian‘s desire to return to the ―genuine and native
taste‖ of the child and the uneducated can be understood rather as a process of
deconstructing or unlearning habits of thinking that would obscure an approach to history
in which there is ―nothing old under the sun.‖65
65
Here we might also note a further connection between Godwin and Blake. As Saree Makdisi points out, a
similar process of ―unlearning‖ can be found in Blake‘s idea of a revolutionary Jesus who ―supposes every
106
Godwin metaphorically identifies his method for unlearning institutions of
thought and descending into the ―pre-history‖ of the self as a kind of magnetism: ―we go
forth into the world; we see what man is; we enquire what he was; and when we return
home and engage in the solemn act of self-investigation, our most useful employment is
to produce the materials we have collected abroad, and, by a sort of magnetism, cause
those particulars to start out to view in ourselves, which might otherwise have lain for
ever undetected‖ (455). The magnetic ―starting out‖ of particulars develops enquiry
towards what Percy Shelley later calls the ―unapprehended relations of things‖ circulating
beneath the generalizing and classifying mechanisms of ordinary perception or ―reason‖
(Shelley‟s Poetry and Prose 480, 484). In the very process of approaching singularities
―already there,‖ these same singularities call for their own invention. What is individual
is never given from the start in seeing what man ―is.‖ Enquiry only begins through a
proto-genealogical return to what man ―was,‖ to the past through which his present being
emerges. Returning to what man ―was‖ does not mean seeing the past as a means of
justification for the institution(s) of the present. In the movement of descent, Godwin
suggests that enquiry must have a productive relationship with the materials collected,
giving ―energy and utility to the records of our social existence‖ rather than reproducing a
―mere chronicle of facts, places and dates‖: ―He that knows only what day the Bastille
was taken and on what spot Louis XVI perished, knows nothing. He professes the mere
skeleton of history. The muscles, the articulations, every thing in which the life
emphatically resides, is absent.‖ Godwin arrives at the paradoxical and protogenealogical conclusion that ―there is nothing more uncertain, more contradictory, more
unsatisfying than the evidence of facts‖ (457, 462).
Thing to be Evident to the Child & to the Poor & Unlearned.‖ Blake‘s implicit suggestion is that ―our very
‗learning‘ is what stands in the way of our reading . . . with all the freshness of a child, whose ‗rouzing‘
faculties are uninhibited by paradigms of reading and by literary and aesthetic conventions, and perhaps
even by the regulations of ‗State Trickery‘ itself‖ (Blake, ―Annotations to Berkeley‘s Sirius‖ E 664;
Makdisi, ―The Political Aesthetic of Blake‘s Images‖ 111). In a similar fashion, Nietzsche sees unlearning
in the form of an ―active‖ forgetting symbolized by the figure of the child in Thus Spake Zarathustra: ―the
child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game‖ (27). Active forgetting deploys the figure of
the child as a metaphor for a return to a ―pre-history‖ through which the individual is a historical power
capable of creating new values that portend a future.
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As Klancher and Rajan respectively argue, it is in this sense that Godwin aligns
with Hans Kellner‘s notion of ―counter-factual‖ history and provides an opening for a
―romantic‖ or literary approach to history that stresses the contingency of historical
processes rather than permanence of nations and governments (Rajan, ―Introduction‖ 19;
Klancher, ―Godwin and the Genre Reformers‖ 27).66 Godwin identifies the combined
sense of the counter-factual and the contingent as ―historical license‖ (licentia historica):
―the noblest and most excellent species of history, may be decided to be a composition in
which, with a scanty substratum of facts and dates, the writer interweaves a number of
happy, ingenious and instructive inventions, blending them into one continuous and
indiscernible mass‖ (462-3). Yet, Godwin‘s sense of historical license is not ―revisionist‖
in its approach to the past. Historical revisionism connects to historical license only in the
sense that both refer to events that may not have occurred. The focus of historical
revision, however, is not merely to propose alternatives to the past but to effectively
replace it as actual history. Thus what Godwin calls ―license‖ is to be distinguished from
what Lubomir Dolezel calls the ―distorted history‖ of revisionism: ―Distorted history is a
tool of totalitarian ideology for enforcing its image of the past. Counterfactual history is a
tool of historiography to help us understand better the actual past‖ (800). Distorted
history, to the contrary, applies itself to the ―permanent rewriting of history, following the
shifts in political power,‖ that actively attempt to ―remake the actual past‖ by using
revisionist methods such as ―erasing every historical agent who became persona non
grata‖ (Dolezel 797).
Distorted history isolates an alternative to history but subsequently re-writes it as
history, erasing elements of the actual past that disturb its ideological mastery. The
inability to traverse its own blind spot, so to speak, renders general history both unaware
of its own finitude as an epistemological model, but also unaware of its real historical
effects. By effacing the individual persona non grata, general history closes down the
66
In the introduction to her edition of Mary Shelley‘s Valperga (1990), Rajan helpfully aligns Godwin‘s
sense of counter-factual history in ―Of History and Romance‖ and St. Leon with the Leibnizian postulate of
―possible worlds,‖ showing that ―once imagined . . . counterfactuals cannot develop fantastically [i.e.
entirely in the domain of ―romance‖] but must unfold necessarily, according to the logic of the ‗set‘ or
series to which they belong‖ (20).
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perspectives that would expose its own absence of foundation or archē. To the contrary,
individual history takes the an-archic figure of the persona non grata obscured by ―the
history of negotiations and tricks . . . corruption and political profligacy‖ as its very
content (461). As such, individual history reconfirms the affinity between history and
human agency. The individual is not a static form positioned within a sedentary structure,
but a ―vector in a multi-dimensional space‖ of potentials (Dolezel 800). To approach the
complex of individual actions carried out by multiple individuals is to engage how the
tissue of potentials shifts through the actions of the historical agent. Dismissing
potentialities as merely fictional or insignificant for not being materially actualized in a
particular situation is precisely to distort history, since every actual occurrence is itself
saturated with virtual alternatives, the fabric of which historian Hugh Trevor-Roper calls
the ―the total pattern of forces whose pressure created the event‖ (13).
This total pattern of forces approaches Godwin‘s metaphor of a ―magnetic field‖
through which particulars start out in their individuality, and describes its interwoven
composite of ―ingenious and instructive inventions‖ with the ―scanty substratum‖ of facts
and dates. The substratum of facts appears to the eye of the individual historian not as
positive data that can be synthesized into a general principle so much as a heterogeneous
collection of ―broken fragments‖ and ―scattered ruins‖ that lack clear significance or
connection, forming a network of particulars difficult to fully unravel (―HR‖ 462). The
problem that calls for historical license, which eventually feeds into romance, is in
establishing connections among these fragments that does not sublimate their
particularity, but brings heterogeneous parts together to emphasize their ―magnetical
virtue‖; that is, heterogeneous elements functioning together as a unity of their parts.
The production of this ―peripheral‖ totality, to use Daniel W. Smith‘s term,
neither unifies nor totalizes but ―has an effect on these parts, since it is able to create nonpreexistent relations between elements that in themselves remain disconnected, and are
left intact‖ (xxiii). In this respect, the individual historian can also be compared to a kind
of bricoleur. The bricoleur is contrasted with the ―Engineer,‖ who, as Derrida explains,
represents the subject as a mythical totality, ―the absolute origin of his own discourse and
would supposedly construct it ‗out of nothing‘‖ (―Structure, Sign, and Play‖ 232). The
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―myth‖ of the Engineer traverses both general history and the theoretical construction of
the liberal subject in the eighteenth century. As John Milbank points out, the subject-asEngineer is discernible in Adam Smith‘s conception of individuals as a set of ―unrelated
individual starting points – persons and properties sprung from nowhere‖ (41). This
conception of the individual ex nihilo is at odds with Godwin‘s view of necessity as well
as a broader philosophical perspective which, as he states in an unpublished essay ―On
Miracles,‖ ―cannot understand the producing of something out of nothing‖ (Essays Never
Before Published 260). Sprung from nowhere, the Engineer marks the general form of the
individual that denies its historicity; if the Engineer promotes the in-dividual in the sense
of being an atomic punctum, there is nothing that makes this in-dividual an
―individuality.‖
The peripheral figure of the individual, once composed, is neither closed nor
finished. Rather, the individual is a composite of inclinations and anxieties that fluctuates
with the total pattern of forces and relations that create it. The sense in which Godwin
refers to the individual can be supplemented by Nietzsche‘s idea of individuality as a
historical trope for the production of the new or the different, implicated in its magnetic
capacity to start out from the ―universal, green pasture happiness of the herd‖ (Beyond
Good and Evil 41). Indeed, Godwin sees the ―lethargy‖ of the liberal subject as
equivalent to one who associates only with ―ordinary men‖ and is ―in danger of becoming
such as they are.‖ General history cultivates this danger by reducing individuals to
ordinary men under a law of imitation. On the contrary, for Godwin the individual
dissolves the institution(s) of the present in the direction of a future not yet invested by
forms of imitation. The individualities excavated by a return to the past must also be
discerned as productive of a future rather than another present: ―we shall be enabled to
add, to the knowledge of the past, a sagacity that can penetrate into the depths of futurity‖
(457). In a similar vein, Nietzsche argues that ―only he who builds the future [has] a right
. . . to pass judgment on the past‖; that is, it is only insofar as one is capable of creating a
future that the individuality of the past starts out in its ―magnetical virtue‖ (Untimely 94).
This ―oracular judgment‖ of the past ―as an architect of the future‖ exposes the institution
to both pre-historical and post-historical senses against which the ―ground‖ of the present
becomes radically uncertain. If the imitative law of general history produces an image of
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time as an all-encompassing present, then individual history develops a conception in
which, as Deleuze argues, ―only the past and future inhere or subsist in time. Instead of a
present which absorbs the past and the future, a future and past divide the present at every
instant and subdivide it ad infinitum‖ (Logic of Sense 164-5).
Through a method of descent, individual history subdivides the abstract generality
of the present into pre- and post-historical tendencies that are constantly dividing the
present from within. In contrast to the circular time of a perpetual now, Deleuze refers to
the subdivision of the past and future as that of a ―straight line,‖ echoing Nietzsche‘s idea
that ―the individual is the entire life up until now in one line and not its result‖ (qtd. in
Hamacher 154). Nietzsche‘s sense of the individual as composed in a ―straight line‖
follows a distinctively Nietzschean interpretation of destiny that can be linked to
Godwin‘s understanding of necessity. As Deleuze points out, for Nietzsche, destiny is not
the abolition of chance but its affirmation: ―necessity is affirmed of chance in as much as
chance itself is affirmed‖ (Nietzsche 26). Similarly, Godwin suggests that a ―true history‖
will consist of the ―delineation of consistent, human character, in a display of the manner
in which such a character acts under successive circumstances, in showing how character
increases and assimilates new substances to its own, and how it decays, together with the
catastrophe into which by its own gravity it naturally declines‖ (466). Although there is a
necessity through which the individual unfolds, such necessity does not ground the
individual in a secure future that could be known in advance. Instead, the past and the
future appear unsettling: ―the man who does not want to become part of the masses,‖
Nietzsche argues, ―needs only to stop being comfortable with himself‖ (Untimely 127).
This unsettling marks a second aspect of individual history‘s magnetism identified
by Godwin, namely, that the individual produces a libidinal spark that leaps from the
individuality of the past towards capabilities not yet realized within the present, affecting
the potential for a repetition of a past that was, from the perspective of general history,
inexistent: ―there must be an exchange of real sentiments, or an investigation of subtle
peculiarities, before improvement can be the result. . . . [T]here must be friction and heat,
before the virtue will operate‖ (458). What is transmitted is not the ―same‖ of the general
but the very historical inequality, the difference, of individuality as such. Thus, Godwin
111
argues that the reader will ―insensibly imbibe the same spirit, and burn with kindred
fires‖ as the inequality that individuates the poet, sage, or patriot (456). It is this
unconscious transmission that Godwin identifies as ―influence‖ in his essay ―Of Choice
in Reading‖ for The Enquirer, written slightly prior to ―Of History and Romance.‖ The
reader of Shakespeare or Milton, for example, ―communicates a portion of the inspiration
all around him. It passes from man to man, till it influences the whole mass‖ to a point at
which ―every man . . . is changed from what he was‖ (140). In the context of Godwin‘s
sense of necessity connecting everything to everything else, ―influence‖ can be discerned
in its root sense as a fluid inflow affecting human destiny and an imperceptible action at a
distance that exerts changes. As Godwin suggests, it is only through individual history
that we ―feel ourselves impelled to explore new and untrodden paths‖ (456). This
affective transmission through literature foreshadows Godwin‘s claim for ―romance‖ as a
power for creating and forming history, one that will eventually lead to an even more
paradoxical idea that romance itself is the true form of history.
The recondite circulation of influence refers individuality less to deliberative
inter-subjective communication than to affect, in Deleuze and Guattari‘s sense of
imperceptible, intensive relations that are not the property of subjects but ―go beyond the
strength of those who undergo them‖ (What is Philosophy? 164, 174). Godwin‘s
development of individual history as magnetism invests history with intensive relations
beneath the imitative forms that it will assume for general history. This is to say that the
magnetic invests a certain desire in history through which the discourse of the individual
ruptures the ―torpid tranquility‖ of a general-historical typology of individuals without
individuality or history en masse. Adapting a term used by Bergson, Deleuze calls this
process ―fabulation,‖ a laicized mythmaking function proper to art that creates affective
connections between individuals which serve as the germ for future potentials (Essays
Critical and Clinical 3).67 This affective magnetism, catalyzed by the ―sharp edges‖ of
67
Deleuze adapts the term ―fabulation‖ from Bergson‘s Two Sources of Religion and Morality (1935).
Bergson refers to the ―fabulation function‖ as a property of closed or static morality. In this context,
fabulation is a function of the imagination that creates ―voluntary hallucinations‖ through which we posit
the existence of gods, spirits, etc. For Bergson, fabulation is essentially negative in that it fosters strict
obedience to these images of gods as a means of effecting social cohesion. Conversely, Deleuze suggests
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the individual, renders history the domain of simulacra. Simulacra, as Deleuze points out
with respect to Plato, do not refer to bad copies in relation to a presupposed model;
rather, the simulacrum ―harbors a positive power which denies the original and the copy,
the model and the reproduction‖ (Logic of Sense 256, 262).68 Simulacra must be raised
from the depths of general history in which they are suppressed or ignored towards its
surface, releasing what Deleuze calls the ―power of the false‖: ―Far from being a new
foundation, [the simulacrum] engulfs all foundations, it assures a universal breakdown . .
. an un-founding‖ (Logic of Sense 262). The power of the false is distinct from revisionist
distortions of history. The latter operate within the dialectic of models and copies insofar
as they destroy historical actualities in order to ―conserve and perpetuate the established
order of representations‖ (Logic of Sense 266). The persona non grata, however, is more
of a simulacrum insofar as it harbours the potential to challenge general and distorted
historical narratives alike.
Just as simulacra have a tendency to overturn the relation between true and false,
Godwin radically displaces the ―truth‖ of what calls itself history and the falsehood of the
―fable‖: ―I ask not, as a principal point, whether it be true or false? My first enquiry is,
‗Can I derive instruction from it? Is it a genuine praxis upon the nature of man? Is it
that ―we ought to take up Bergson‘s idea of fabulation and give it a political meaning‖ through which it
takes on a more creative and transgressive sense.
68
Deleuze‘s ―creative‖ conception of simulacra is to be distinguished from Jean Baudrillard‘s more
pessimistic reading of the term. In Simulations (1983), Baudrillard stages Plato‘s definition of simulacra as
the consequence of postmodernity‘s substitution of signs for the real, thereby erasing any reference to an
external or historical model of reality (4). Instead, signs endlessly circulate in relation to one another,
standing for nothing but themselves, ultimately becoming interchangeable in an immaterial simulated
universe Baudrillard terms the ―hyperreal.‖ In the absence of any external referent, Baudrillard suggests
that our existence is limited to naïve realism, futilely maintaining the shattered representational link
between image and world, or becoming a neutralized ―sponge‖ that transiently absorbs the ceaseless
exchange and circulation of signs amongst themselves. Where Baudrillard agrees with Deleuze is on the
basic definition of simulacra as evading the representational matrix of model and copy. However,
Baudrillard‘s sense of simulacra as ―hypperreal‖ tends towards a nostalgia for a lost real. For Deleuze, who
stages his discussion with respect to Nietzsche, the task is to ―to make the simulacra rise and to affirm their
rights‖ (Logic of Sense 262). This requires first the recognition that the model is itself a simulation: there is
no ―model‖ that was lost and thus nothing to lament. On the basis of this idea, Deleuze suggests that
simulacra open a space for creation, a ―life‖ of the false that ―carries the real beyond its principle to the
point where it is effectively produced,‖ thus creating as of yet unseen combinations of potentials from the
destitution of ―reality.‖
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pregnant with the most generous motives and examples? If so, I had rather be profoundly
versed in this fable, than in all the genuine histories that ever existed‘‖ (461). The
question concerning romance is not what it means (interpretation) but how it functions
(experimentation).69 Through the experimental figure of ―meaning as use,‖ individual
history opens a transvaluation of history. The fable that sustains general history is
precisely its claim to represent history truthfully, while the individual historian‘s
interweaving of facts with ―ingenious and instructive inventions‖ constitutes a ―genuine
praxis upon the nature of man,‖ gesturing to the power of the ―false‖ simulacrum to affect
―real‖ history. Godwin thus inverts the charge that romance misrepresents historical
personages and events and leads readers to confuse fiction with history (464-5). Rather,
Godwin counter-intuitively argues that ―the graver and more authentic name of history‖
is more susceptible to deluding its readers since, as a discourse, history claims to
represent actual states of affairs.
With an eye to how history is genealogically over-determined by competing
perspectives, Godwin challenges both the evidential claims of individuals ―who lived
upon the spot‖ and the idea that ―the true history of a public transaction is never known
till many years after the event‖: ―Whitlock and Clarendon . . . differ as much in their view
of the transactions, as Hume and the Whig historians have since done. Yet all are
probably honest. If you be a superficial thinker you will take up with one or another of
their representations, as best suits your prejudices. But, if you are a profound one, you
will see so many incongruities and absurdities in all‖ (465).70 The ―superficial‖ thinker is
literally a thinker of representational surfaces and their generalities, whereas the
―profound‖ thinker descends into substrata of history‘s diverse materials and exposes the
incongruities through which history‘s claim to truth is ungrounded by the very evidence it
seeks to legitimize as truth. As the method through which particulars otherwise unnoticed
come into view, individual history unsettles the very dialectic internal to general and
69
See also Deleuze (2000), 129.
According to Handwerk and Markley‘s note in their edition of Caleb Williams, ―Bustrode Whitlocke
(1605-75) and the Earl of Clarendon (1609-74) wrote opposed accounts of the Glorious Revolution, as
Hume and the Whig historians later did‖ (465 n1).
70
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individual history, thus exposing history to a non-historical Outside in which individual
history becomes indiscernible from ―romance.‖
4.3 Between Individual History and Romance
According to Godwin, if the individual historian‘s sense of ―historical license‖ renders
history ―too near a resemblance to fable,‖ ―romance then, strictly considered, may be
pronounced to be one of the species of history‖ (464). This implies that romance can be
initially considered a species of individual history. In the very next sentence, however,
Godwin further distinguishes romance‘s approach to the individual: ―the historian is
confined to individual incident and individual man, and must hang upon his invention or
conjecture as he can‖ where ―the writer of romance collects his materials from all
sources, experience, report and the records of human affairs; then generalizes them; and
finally selects, from their elements and the various combinations they afford, those
instances which he is best qualified to portray‖ (464).
Godwin‘s description of romance in this passage is nearly identical to his earlier
sense of individual history as the process of seeing what man is, enquiring what he was,
(re)producing the materials collected, and causing them to stand out in their particularity
―by a sort of magnetism‖ (455). The question remains: in what sense is individual history
different from romance, since they name nearly identical processes? Earlier in the essay,
Godwin also criticizes general history for studying humankind as a ―mass‖ when
individual history itself allows for history and romance to interweave facts with
―instructive inventions‖ into ―one continuous and indiscernible mass.‖ Near his
conclusion, Godwin will shift the meanings of his terms even further, claiming that the
―writer of romance . . . is to be considered the writer of real history; while he who was
formerly called the historian must be contented to step down into the place of his rival,
with this disadvantage, that he is a romance writer, without the ardour, the enthusiasm,
and the sublime science of imagination‖ (466). Romance passes from a subordinate
position in which it is not a ―genre‖ but a species of history to a simulacrum of individual
history. Godwin then appears to overturn the relation between history and romance
entirely, such that the former becomes subordinate to the latter. In his conclusion,
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however, Godwin again reasserts the advantage of history over romance: ―[The historian]
indeed does not understand the character he exhibits, but the events are taken out of his
hands and determined by the system of the universe, and therefore, as far as his
information extends, must be true. The romance writer, on the other hand, is continually
straining at a foresight to which his faculties are incompetent, and continually fails‖
(467). Even still, Godwin describes the regained advantage of history over romance as
―imperfect‖ and thus unstable.
Rather than perceive these terminological exchanges as mere inconsistencies, it
can be argued that Godwin pushes his terms to the point where they change their nature
and are reversed into simulacra. As Deleuze points out, simulacra produce an effect of
resemblance, but ―by totally different means than those at work within the model. The
simulacrum is built upon a disparity or upon a difference . . . If the simulacrum still has a
model, it is another model, a model of the Other from which there flows an internalized
dissemblance‖ (Logic of Sense 258). The masses studied by general history involve
accumulations of particulars organized according to an imitative principle that restricts its
diversity of content to a theoretical framework that posits nothing new under the sun. On
the contrary, the indiscernible mass through which ―the falsehood and impossibility of
history‖ shifts to ―the reality of romance‖ describes an inventive becoming. When history
descends from generalities and encounters the excess of the individual, it dissimulates
into impossibility. It is no longer possible to tell the ―truth‖ in the sense of the
conventional, national, or institutional narratives. However, the point at which history
encounters its own internal dissimilarity via the individual and is caught in the overt act
of ―making up fictions‖ also opens a potential a line of flight upon which romance
renders palpable a fragile, even utopian, dimension through which simulacra are raised
from the depths of history to their romanticized surface. As Deleuze suggests, ―a creator
is someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities . . .
Without a set of impossibilities, you won‘t have a line of flight, the exit that is creation,
the power of falsity that is truth‖ (Negotiations 132).
As a genealogical process, individual history is a diagnostic of history, exposing
the an-archic tangle of motives, passions, and influences through which (general) history
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betrays itself as ―fable.‖ Along with individual history, romance then becomes the work
of searching out what Godwin had identified with his ―metaphysical dissecting knife‖ in
his later recollection of Caleb Williams – that is to say, the work of tracing the obscure
―involutions‖ of character that renders history more an-archically as a network that is
difficult to unravel. At the same time, because this metaphysical dissection discloses the
protean substructure that underwrites the ―fable‖ of instituted versions of history,
romance also discloses potentialities, patterns of forces, internal trajectories of
―perfectibility‖ that are capable of sending history in a different direction: ―we shall not
only understand those events as they arise which are no better than old incidents under
new names, but shall judge truly of such conjunctures and combinations, their sources
and effects, as, though they have never yet occurred, are within the capacities of our
nature‖ (457). History and romance maintain an elective affinity that is magnetic rather
than synthetic, an affective charge that results in both discourses exerting attractive and
repulsive forces upon one another that maintain their relationship as an-archic or in
dissensus. Godwin‘s introduction of romance reflexively de-stabilizes history‘s
relationship to itself, while his return to history at the conclusion of the text highlights the
impossibility of simply transcending history for romance. To paraphrase Deleuze,
individual history does not move solely within its own discourse but inspires new
―affects‖ that constitute a non-historical apprehension of history itself, while romance is
in turn made responsible to the history or necessity – the complex ―system of the world‖
– in which it is enmeshed (Deleuze, Negotiations 164). The individual hovers between
the ―conceptual personae‖ of history and an ―aesthetic figure‖ proper to romance, ―two
entities that often pass into one another, in a becoming that carries them both into an
intensity that co-determines them‖ (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 66).
Godwin identifies this intensity as the ―magnetical virtue in man‖ through which history
and romance partake of an ―exchange of real sentiments.‖
Godwin‘s unsettled terminology expresses that romance and history cannot
definitively occupy the same figurative level so as to be reducible to one another. Rather,
the twisting argumentative course of Godwin‘s own essay deconstructs the opposition
between history and romance so as to open the possibility of reading both discourses anarchically, with and through one another. In the first instance, romance appears
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subordinated to the genre as a ―style‖ through which history reasserts the significance of
the individual. Romance is a species of history insofar as it can be used to illustrate the
epistemological truth-claims of individual history. However, Godwin recognizes that
even individual history is subject to generic constraints that romance is not, namely the
discovery or conjecture of evidence capable of forming a model that refers to an actual
past. The presence or absence of evidence constrains individual history to models that are
more or less plausible for the representation of the past, whereas romance is not restricted
to making truth-claims concerning an actual past. The operative question, as Godwin
maintains, is not ―whether it be true or false‖ but ―Can I derive instruction from it?‖
(461). This question opens romance to a distinctive relationship with its historical
materials, allowing for simulacra to rise to the surface via potential combinations
otherwise foreclosed by general history. Nonetheless, it is precisely history‘s so-called
constraints that allow romance to function as counter-factual, and hence to some degree
bound up with the factual – that is to say, romance can be understood as an explication of
the virtual or magnetic pattern of potential forces that shape historical events, rather than
simply imaginary or a projection of possibility beyond all necessity. If Godwin sees in
romance a certain negative capability, in Keats‘ sense of a discourse capable of being in
―uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason‖
(Selected Letters 41-2), then history lends romance a capable negativity within the
vicissitudes that constitute the ―system of the universe.‖
In this respect, romance cannot be discerned through anticipated expansions of
historical knowledge: ―the romance writer, on the other hand, is continually straining at a
foresight to which his faculties are incompetent, and continually fails‖ (467). While the
historian regains a certain ―imperfect‖ advantage over the writer of romance in this
regard, the constraint on the romance-writer‘s powers of extending truth towards what
Godwin calls ―the system of the universe‖ is precisely what renders its own truth, or
power of the false, non-totalizable (467). Godwin thus distinguishes his approach from
those who would treat romance as an ―object of trade among booksellers,‖ whose
circulation as commodities produces a kind of general history of literature in which ―the
critic and moralist, in their estimate of romances, have borrowed the principle that
regulates the speculations of trade‖ (463). The reduction of literature to market principles
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re-territorializes potential sites of novelty within a homogeneous field that levels the
―individuality‖ of literature itself: ―Nothing can be more unreasonable,‖ writes Godwin,
―than for me to take into account every pretender to literature that has started in it. In
poetry I do not consider those persons who merely know how to count their syllables and
tag a rhyme; still less those who print their effusion in the form of verse without being
adequate to either of these‖ (464). To see romance as a power of the false and the
singular as a historical power, neither romance nor the individual can be considered
according to the logic of economic exchange. Only generalities, because they are
abstract, are exchangeable for one another. Rather, Godwin identifies the individual or
singular character of romance: ―I recollect those authors only who are endowed with
some of the essentials of poetry, with its imagery, its enthusiasm, or its empire over the
soul of man. Just so in the cause before us, I should consider only those persons who had
really written romance, not those who had vainly attempted it‖ (464). This intensifies
Godwin‘s sense of romance as individual: of all those literary works that come out, very
few are worthy of being considered romances.
Romance does not attain a definite form but remains, as Schlegel likewise defines
the romantic, in perpetual becoming. Romance subtracts itself from history as that which
no historical knowledge or imitative form can definitively circumscribe. Paradoxically,
Godwin suggests that in failing history, romance also exceeds it: ―to write romance is a
task too great for the powers of man, and under which he must be expected to totter. No
man can hold the rod so even, but that it will tremble and vary from its course‖ (466).
Romance is a trembling of discourse that pushes history to its limit and makes visible its
individuality. Romance‘s ―failure‖ is not a limitation, but derives from an experience too
powerful, something that overflows and de-regulates the faculties that can serve as a
condition for experimentation. Romance does not claim to represent the way the past
―actually‖ was as in revisionist accounts, but rather unearths the imperceptible texture of
individual events and circumstances that constitute history‘s becoming. The shift from
history to romance is not literal but indirect, occurring by virtue of a repetition that opens
individualities otherwise elided by general history. In this regard, Godwin effects a
radical inversion of fidelity and betrayal with respect to the dialectic of fictional romance
and true history; indeed, romance shows its fidelity to history by virtue of its betrayal.
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Only in betraying the ―letter‖ of history is one capable of approaching the individual
―spirit‖ of its creative stimulus, the magnetic spark through which history enters into a
becoming-romantic. Conversely, insofar as general history remains faithful to
reproducing a ―mere chronicle of facts, places and dates,‖ it betrays ―true history.‖ The
paradox is that general history is not true history precisely because it lacks romance,
while romance is true history because it incessantly betrays its historical evidence.
Godwin thus theorizes a romance that does not seek to replace history, but provide a
means of setting history ―adrift‖ through the dual process of diagnosing the institutions of
the present and exposing individualities in the past that literature grants a distinctive
historical potentiality.
At the same time, however, the conclusion of ―Of History and Romance‖ abruptly
checks romance‘s desire to simply posit the possible within the cloistered domain of a
literature that transcends or evades the materiality of the historical. To posit romance over
history would be to simply institute the literary, thus truncating the interminable
unworking that Godwin locates as the anarchē of perfectibility. In doing so, Godwin
theorizes a new paradigm for his own writing of literature and of the place of history in
literature in a negative dialectic that avoids institutional stasis. Indeed, the novel written
immediately following ―Of History and Romance,‖ St. Leon, a tale of the sixteenth
century (1798), puts Godwin‘s new understanding of history and romance into practice.
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Chapter 5
5
Gambling, Alchemy, and Anarchy in St. Leon
The previous chapter explored how ―Of History and Romance‖ extends Political
Justice‘s critique of generalization into a more complex reflection on the an-archic and
undecidable relationship between history and literature. Where Godwin earlier saw
romance in a more conventional Enlightenment sense as a form of a false consciousness
to be dispelled by the rationality of ―literature,‖ ―Of History and Romance‖ reinterprets
romance as a way of understanding both history and romance otherwise by accounting
for the an-archic potential of the ―individual‖ while unsettling any simplistic binary
distinction between history and fiction. In turn, Godwin challenges the Scottish
Enlightenment‘s view of history as an actuarial collection of facts that would dissolve
individuality within an overarching template of the same. By loosening history from the
restrictions placed upon it by the disciplinary armatures of such methods, individuality
becomes an an-archic site for reflecting on the contingency and potentiality within a
history that is still becoming. As the primary figure through which romance enters
history, individuality historicizes romance so that the latter becomes answerable to the
complex of particulars and ―materials‖ out of which history is composed. Conversely,
Godwin deploys romance in the mode of the counter-factual so as to work within
history‘s unrealized potentials, thus unworking the reified aspect of what claims the
status of historical ―truth.‖ History and romance thus find themselves unsettled by their
mutual translations and transferences in and through one another, with each term
inhabited by its other in a productive tension that approximates Derrida‘s an-archic view
of literature as the ―unlimited right‖ to question (On the Name 28).
This chapter further examines Godwin‘s shifting attitudes towards the utopian
potentials released through fiction and its critical dialogue with history as it appears in his
1799 novel St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century. The novel tells of the Count
Reginald de St. Leon, a French aristocrat whose addiction to high-stakes gambling sees
him lose his inheritance and bring his family to ruin. Exiled to rural Switzerland, St. Leon
and his young family find temporary repose in a life of pastoral tranquility. Six years of
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domestic peace are shattered, however, with the arrival of a mysterious stranger who
teaches St. Leon the secrets of alchemy. Far from providing lasting happiness, St. Leon‘s
acquisition of the philosopher‘s stone leads to both public and private disaster. Promising
absolute secrecy to the stranger, St. Leon becomes an object of persecution and
subsequently alienates his family. After the death of his long suffering wife Marguerite
and a near fatal run-in with the Spanish Inquisition, St. Leon eventually travels to Turkish
occupied Hungary in an attempt to use his alchemical knowledge for philanthropic
purposes. But St. Leon‘s attempts at financially and politically emancipating the
Hungarian populace also backfire, culminating in the financial ruin of the country and his
imprisonment at the hands of Bethlem Gabor, a misanthropic nobleman who exploits St.
Leon‘s alchemical knowledge for his own dark purposes. Despite escaping Gabor and
reuniting with his estranged son Charles near the conclusion of the novel – a reunion
tempered by the fact that Charles does not recognize his father, who has taken the elixir
of youth and now travels under the pseudonym D‘Aubigny – St. Leon finds himself ―the
outcast of [his] species,‖ wandering from country to country under assumed names with
―neither connection nor friend in the world‖ (358, 396).
As a fictional working-through of the ideas in ―Of History and Romance,‖ St.
Leon is a text designed to explore the dissensus between things as they are and things as
they could be. That St. Leon largely fails in his attempts at putting his alchemical
knowledge to proper use has led many critics to read the novel as an apologia for the
failure of Godwin‘s political anarchism. With the increasingly vehement reaction to the
Terror, the proximity of Wollstonecraft‘s untimely death in 1797, and the public backlash
that greeted Godwin‘s candid memoirs of his late wife,71 earlier critics situate St. Leon
alongside Political Justice‘s displacement of reason for feeling as a meditation on the
importance of the familial affections and the failure of an anarchism founded on pure
reason. As Pamela Clemit points out, alchemy in late eighteenth-century discourse is
often deployed as a metaphor by conservatives who saw the French Revolution as
organized by cabal of philosophical ―Illuminati,‖ who ―aimed at the destruction of all
71
The Memoirs of the Author of the Vindications of the Rights of Women (1798).
122
family ties in the name of universal philanthropy‖ (The Godwinian Novel 92).72 As with
Caleb Williams, Godwin‘s preface to St. Leon provides evidence for interpreting the
novel this way in its emphasis on the importance of the ―domestic and private affections‖:
―For more than four years, I have been anxious for opportunity and leisure to modify
some of the earlier chapters of [Political Justice] in conformity to the sentiments
inculcated in [St. Leon]. . . . I apprehend domestic and private affections inseparable from
the nature of man . . . and am fully persuaded that they are not incompatible with a
profound and active sense of justice‖ (52). Critics such as Wallace Austin Flanders, J.T.
Boulton, and D.H. Monro thus tend to read alchemy, in B.J. Tysdahl‘s words, as a
symbol for ―those aspects of society that Godwin wants to criticize,‖ whether it be St.
Leon‘s Falkland-like obsession with chivalry and reputation, alchemy as a representation
of the Enlightenment‘s enthusiasm for pure reason, or esotericism as an analogue for the
destructive effects of secrecy on domestic life (Tysdahl 86).73
That St. Leon embodies both conservative and revolutionary tendencies, however,
suggests a more complex figure than such interpretations might allow. Described as ―an
equivocal character, assuming different names, and wandering over the world with
different pretences‖ (St.L 447), Godwin opens the possibility of different readings of St.
Leon, who is not simply ―one‖ character. In this sense, St. Leon less represents an
identifiable position to be accepted or rejected – what Godwin would call an institution in
Political Justice – than an experiment with the counter-factual in which Godwin
skeptically confronts the impasses of whatever claims to posit itself, including the
romance of a perfected being that Political Justice had placed as the (im)possible horizon
of an anarchē oriented towards the future. Unlike Caleb Williams, which deconstructs the
essentialist aspects of ―classical‖ anarchism within the parameters of ―things as they
72
See also Kelly, 212-3.
See Flanders, 536-7; Boulton, 226-32; Monro, 98-101. Reflecting on the connections between St. Leon
and Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein noted by Walter Scott in 1818, Brewer suggests that Godwin and
Shelley‘s respective novels articulate the ways in which ―reveries can be dangerous in the case of
individuals who are prone to neglect practical or personal considerations,‖ while Don Locke argues that the
novel‘s use of alchemy is a ―hackneyed‖ Gothic conceit, and that the real emotional interest of the novel
lies with Godwin‘s sympathetic representation of the domestic affections in the blameless Marguerite
(Brewer, Mental Anatomies 183; Locke, The Fantasy of Reason 146-7).
73
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are,‖74 St. Leon explicitly gestures towards the speculative figure of perfection in the
Appendix to Political Justice as a romance, which ―Of History and Romance‖ understood
as ―real‖ history only in its failure to institute itself as (general) history. But if Godwin
provides the materials for us to read St. Leon in terms that would censure his Promethean
ambitions, this approach limits the novel by privileging notions of domesticity and utility
that would also institutionalize the novel by aligning it with a specific set of conservative
values that suspend the reflective and ungrounding movement associated with
perfectibility. For as Derrida points out, ―the law of the house (oikos), of the house as
place, domicile, family‖ is a figure within the etymology of archē and remains attached
to its logocentrism (Archive Fever 1-2). Consequently, as Justine Crump remarks, to
―derive a commonplace condemnation‖ of St. Leon would be to ―impose orthodox
sentiments‖ onto a ―radical philosopher,‖ thereby reducing the novel to a ―static . . .
ahistorical piece of didacticism‖ in which the reader prejudges St. Leon according to
values already instituted, rather than a site for critical reflection on the ―archaic‖ status of
such values (―Gambling, History, and Godwin‘s St. Leon‖ 404).
Rather than perceive St. Leon from a didactic position that rejects the archē of a
rational anarchism for a structurally equivalent domestic oikos, this chapter explores how
Godwin employs the gambler and the alchemist not as positions or institutions, but as
―individualities‖ whose existence on the margins of accepted social, moral, and economic
institutions provides a means for Godwin to critically explore utopian possibilities in a
history that remains an-archically contingent. Following Caleb Williams and the revised
versions of Political Justice, St. Leon finds Godwin continuing to skeptically confront the
impasses within his own idealism, as he rigorously exposes the detrimental effects of St.
Leon‘s selfish desire for fame. Yet, this skepticism does not entail an automatic
endorsement of domestic values. For if, as Godwin writes in the novel‘s preface, ―the
foundation of the following tale is such as, it is not to be supposed, ever existed‖ (51),
then one might legitimately ask whether the domestic affections can serve as the moral
74
As Godwin writes in his later preface to the first edition of Fleetwood, ―Caleb Williams was a story of
very surprising and uncommon events, but which were supposed to be entirely within the laws and
established course of nature, as she operates in the planet we inhabit. The story of St. Leon is of the
miraculous class‖ (47).
124
archē of a tale that is admitted to be an-archically groundless from the outset, or whether
such foundations can be interpreted as one historical or structural position among several
within the novel and, as such, are contingent and subject to critique.
For the same reasons, one might question whether St. Leon‘s character can be
posited in such a manner that we might pass ―ethical sentence‖ on the novel, as Godwin
elsewhere argues in his criticisms of didactic fiction in The Enquirer.75 As an amorphous,
Protean figure who assumes multiple identities, St. Leon is implicitly connected with
Political Justice‘s description of the an-archic flux of ideas and sensations in the mind
prior to their sedimentation into habits, prejudices, and concepts, just as Godwin‘s use of
alchemy gestures to a chemistry not yet established upon firm scientific and philosophical
foundations.76 As such, I suggest that St. Leon might be usefully read in terms of what
Deleuze, after Lévi-Strauss, calls a ―floating signifier,‖ that is, a figure whose value is
―‗in itself void of [any determinate] sense and thus susceptible to taking on any sense,‖ ―a
displaced place without an occupant‖ that structurally relates signifier and signified – or,
in Godwin‘s terms, romance and history – in a process of continual imbalance and
readjustment. Like the floating signifier, St. Leon belongs neither to history nor to
romance, but rather ―to both series at once, and never ceases to circulate through them.
[The floating signifier] therefore has the property of always being‖ an-archically
―displaced in relation to itself, of ‗being absent from its own place‘‖ and, as such,
addresses both the historicity ―of all finite thought‖ as well as the ―promise‖ of ―aesthetic
75
See ―Of Choice in Reading‖ in The Enquirer (1798), in which Godwin criticizes ―moral‖ authors and
readers of texts who emphasize the ―ethical sentence to the illustration of which the work may most aptly
be applied‖ rather than the dialogical process by which a reader actively participates in the creation of a
meaning that ―cannot be completely ascertained but by the experiment‖ (121). Where the ―moral‖ of a text
suggests that the reader plays a passive role in simply revealing a meaning already presumed to be fixed
within the text, Godwin‘s emphasis on ―experiment‖ might be said to anticipate Roland Barthes‘ notion of
a ―writerly‖ text that aims ―to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text‖ (S/Z 5).
For a more detailed discussion of Godwin‘s theory of reading, see Rajan (1988), 223-5.
76
As Malouin had already suggested in his 1751 article for the French Encyclopédie, ―alchemy has been
maligned in most chemistry books.‖ Venel‘s article on chemistry in the same year still makes use of
alchemical symbols, but nonetheless defers any discussion of alchemy itself to an entry on ―hermetic
philosophy.‖ By 1799, Lavoisier had already published the first modern organization of chemical
nomenclature in his Methode de nomenclature Chimique (1787), stabilizing chemistry as a modern
scientific discourse. Thus Lavoisier‘s collaborator Fourcroy could claim in 1800 that ―chemistry is a
science distinct and separate . . . it can no longer be mistaken for alchemy‖ (qtd. in Chaouli 98-9). See also,
Bensaude-Vincent and Stengers (1996), 13-27.
125
invention‖ (Deleuze, Logic of Sense 49, 51). ―Floating‖ with ―half-formed purpose‖ (St.L
414) across Europe, St. Leon‘s nomadic existence becomes a floating signifier through
which Godwin gauges the possibility of experimenting with ideas in history. As Jeffrey
Mehlman comments, such (im)possibilities avoid closure precisely insofar as the floating
signifier allows for ―symbolic thought to operate despite the contradiction inherent in it‖
(23).
Anarchē itself, which Schürmann defines as a ―blank space deprived of
legislative, normative, power,‖ can also be called a floating signifier; but the term
likewise gestures to how Godwin deploys fiction in order to transform perfectibility into
a form of ―symbolic thought‖ that continues to operate even across the barrier of its own
unverifiability. Further, the concept of the ―floating signifier‖ seems appropriate for a
discussion of alchemy for its connections to Levi-Strauss‘s discussion of mana, which is
also a ―magical‖ substance whose precise meaning remains indeterminate.77 At stake in
such a reading is the very means of understanding the central metaphors of St. Leon
alongside a revised version of perfectibility that persistently ungrounds its own positing,
while providing anarchē with a creative turn that evades reducing the text to a fixed
archē or ―ethical sentence.‖ In this respect, Godwin‘s text does not seem to encourage
either total acceptance or dismissal of St. Leon. Rather, as St. Leon himself avers,
because his alchemical knowledge renders him ―eternal‖ and ―inexhaustible,‖ it signifies
something permanent only in referring to a perfectibility that incessantly ungrounds and
moves beyond itself towards ―something yet unthought,‖ something that ―must be
attempted,‖ and always ―the subject of more than one experiment‖ (147, 245).
This chapter explores St. Leon as a ―floating signifier‖ through the alternately
historical and romantic tropes of the gambler and the alchemist. Such tropes within St.
Leon see Godwin first approaching history in terms of ―individualities‖ incapable of
being incorporated within instituted social forms, a perspective that will be significantly
radicalized in his later novel Mandeville. I proceed first by discussing how Godwin thinks
through the anarchē of individual history via gambling and its relationship to eighteenth-
77
See Lévi-Strauss (1950, trans. 1987).
126
century moral discourse, a discourse that includes the domestic affections as the
sentimental adjunct of a fundamentally conservative political and emotional economy. As
Crump points out, in eighteenth-century ―moral writings about play,‖ gambling ―acted as
a sign for the element of contingency, which . . . had pervaded faith, commerce, and the
social order,‖ giving way to ―a new kind of society in which the value attached to
property, rank and morality‖ is considered relative ―rather than absolute‖ (―The Perils of
Play‖ 27-8). ―Deep play‖ thematizes contingency by rendering the gambler a simulacrum
whose individuality haunts the emergence of bourgeois commercial society. Likewise,
while the text is often justifiably critical of St. Leon‘s destructive habits, certain details
suggest that Godwin is also hesitant to institute the domestic as the text‘s moral archē, as
in the novel‘s later depiction of St. Leon‘s son Charles. Charles, the embodiment of
Marguerite‘s ethos of domestic care earlier in the novel, later returns as a member of the
Crusades who criticizes his father‘s attempts to rescue Hungary for inhibiting the
Christians‘ military-colonial enterprise. Such ambiguities within the text raise the
question of whether the domestic can be posited as the transcendental signified of the
novel, or whether the domestic is itself one system of values among others and therefore
must be read critically.
The chapter then focuses on St. Leon‘s transition from gambler to alchemist, a
transition that plays on a series of ideological associations emphasized by conservative
writers such as Burke. On the one hand, if one views St. Leon as an instituted version of
classical anarchism, it can be argued that Godwin‘s text is primarily interested in showing
how history deconstructs the ―romance‖ of a rational politics, demonstrating through St.
Leon‘s various failures how such anarchism cannot inhabit a synchronic point of view
uncontaminated by the vicissitudes of power it claims to oppose. History thus exposes
alchemy to a reverse transmutation in which the utopian master-narrative of classical
anarchism becomes paradoxically indiscernible from its destructive opposite in
―anarchy.‖ Such reversals are evident both in St. Leon‘s failure to provide lasting
stability to the Hungarian economy and his capture at the hands of Bethlem Gabor, who
forces St. Leon to use his alchemy to finance his band of vicious marauders. Moreover,
Godwin foregrounds a conceptual ―gap‖ between romance and history through the
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structural and narrative lacunae generated by alchemy‘s problematic investment in
secrecy, which divides the alchemical project from itself at its very foundations.
On the other hand, because Godwin sees romance as equally capable of
deconstructing histories that have become instituted, I suggest that Godwin asks us to
read his alchemical romance as a floating signifier that remains equivocal and thus open
to a potentially endless process of revision and reinterpretation. The consequence is that
Godwin‘s novel not only deconstructs the essentialist pretensions of a classical anarchism
that would ground itself on a politics of pure reason, but can also be read as the individual
history of a Protean figure who is ―progressively unbound‖ from the institutions of
―nation and family‖ (Rajan, Romantic Narrative 171).
5.1 Just Gaming: Gambling as Simulacrum
St. Leon‘s role as a floating signifier finds its initial contextual anchoring in an
institutional version of ―romance‖ that both Political Justice and Caleb Williams had
already placed in question: the hierarchical and aristocratic model of society associated
with the ancien régime. Born into ―one of the most ancient and honourable families of the
kingdom of France‖ and influenced by the ―Italian writers of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries,‖ St. Leon clearly echoes Falkland's fatal attachment to outdated chivalric
traditions (54-6). In particular, the historic meeting between Francis I of France and
Henry VIII of England at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1523 is a decisive event in the
young St. Leon‘s life, a ―fairy scene‖ that personifies his aristocratic ethos: ―I lived in the
fairy fields of visionary greatness, and was more than indifferent to the major part of the
objects around me. . . . If Heraclitus, or any other morose philosopher who was expiated
on the universal misery of mankind, had entered the field of Ardres, he must have
retracted his assertions, or fled from the scene with confusion‖ (56, 57).
The expulsion of Heraclitus, the ―dark‖ philosopher for whom life is defined as
the pure flux and the anarchic warfare of coexisting opposites,78 heightens the sense of
78
―We must recognize that war is common, strife is justice, and all things according to strife and
opposition‖ (B80); ―War is the father and king of all‖ (B53). See Barnes (2002). As we shall see in our
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self-mystification in St. Leon‘s attempt to convert history into the moving grandeur of
romance. St. Leon‘s experience in the Field at the Cloth of Gold stirs an ambition to join
under the standard of Francis I‘s military campaign in Italy. As in Caleb Williams,
Godwin discloses the manner in which the aristocratic ethos disguises the Heraclitean
violence at its core. In particular, Godwin focuses on how an analysis of history at the
level of the individual exposes the (un)ground of aristocratic values. Godwin juxtaposes
St. Leon‘s aestheticized descriptions of the military – ―the noise of the cannon . . . the
inspiring sounds of martial music . . . the standards floating in the air . . . the armour of
the knights; the rugged, resolute and intrepid countenances of the infantry; all swelled my
soul with transport‖ (64) – with the anarchy of the ―individual‖ experience of warfare
itself, which sees opposites collapse into the fog of Heraclitean war: ―it was a vain
attempt, amidst the darkness of the night, to endeavour to restore order. . . . We were
already almost completely overpowered, when the succours we expected reached us.
They were, however, unable to distinguish friend from enemy. . . . Our blows were struck
at random‖ (69).
Godwin further thematizes this anarchy through the incursion of a random event
that radically changes the course of the French military campaign, setting the stage for St.
Leon‘s emergence as a gambler. ―Recollecting a stratagem of a similar nature by which
Cyrus formerly makes himself master of the city at Babylon‖ (66), Francis orders his
army to divert the river leading into Pavia. Following a ―general historical‖ notion that
sees ―mankind . . . so much the same, in all times and places,‖ Francis deploys an
imitative stratagem that depends on a view of history as a homogenous pattern of
predictable events that ignores the singularity of the ―case‖ in favour of an abstract,
ahistorical principle. However, Francis‘ plan falls apart after the river unexpectedly
bursts through the dam constructed by the French army, causing the fortune of the battle
to be ―utterly reversed‖ (69-70). Recalling Godwin‘s point in ―Of History and Romance‖
discussion of Mandeville, Godwin suggestively returns to the figure of Heraclitus to disclose the anarchē of
historical antagonism while marking the return of a darker version of the doctrine of ―necessity‖ put forth
in Political Justice.
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that ―a single grain of sand more or less on the surface of the earth, would have altered its
motion, and . . . diversified its events‖ (467), the incursion of a contingent particular that
an-archically undermines Francis‘ general-historical view of time as a stable continuity
in which knowledge of antecedent conditions positively determines the future. Rather, in
the wake of Francis‘ humiliating defeat and imprisonment, St. Leon observes upon his
return to France that ―the chain of . . . ideas was interrupted and the fortune of the
kingdom had received a grievous check‖ (75), marking the force of an event that
―disrupts any pre-existing referential frame within which it might be represented or
understood‖ (Readings, Introducing Lyotard xxxi). The unforeseeable nature of the event
unsettles the instituted referential framework through which the aristocracy hypostasizes
itself as ―eternal‖ rather than conventional: ―far indeed,‖ admits St. Leon, ―was I from
anticipating the disgraceful event, in which this [chivalric] elation of heart speedily
terminated‖ (71).
Godwin contextualizes this sudden irruption within the hypostasized continuity of
chivalric ideals alongside a broader shift in ―referential frames‖ that discloses the
contingent (un)ground of institution. Godwin marks this change through a paraphrase of
Burke‘s famous comment that the collapse of the traditional aristocratic social structure
gives way to a society ruled by ―calculators, economists, and sophisters‖: as St. Leon
similarly remarks, the King‘s defeat in Spain inflicts ―a deadly wound to the reign of
chivalry, and a secure foundation to that of craft, dissimulation, corruption, and
commerce‖ (74). The emergence of commercial civil society effectively puts an end to
the stability of aristocratic fortunes within a social economy based on hereditary wealth
and ―cultural capital‖79 achieved through military honours. Godwin focuses on a specific
consequence of this shift, namely, the emergence of ―deep play‖ among sixteenth-century
French aristocracy: ―the nobility of France exchanged the activity of the field for the
indulgences of the table; that concentrated spirit which had sought to expand itself upon
the widest stage, now found vent in the exhibition of individual expense: and, above all:
79
I borrow this phrase from Pierre Bourdieu. For Bourdieu, cultural capital refers to a type of social
relation expressed in attitudes, knowledge, skill, and education that are capable of conferring both power
and status. See Bourdieu (1997), 47-50.
130
the sordid and inglorious passion for gaming‖ (75). Godwin addresses the effects of this
discursive transformation through St. Leon‘s shifting responses towards gambling and the
ways in which gambling rises within and alongside a commercial and moral paradigm
that institutes itself through a rejection of ―deep play,‖ just as the previous aristocratic
―chain of ideas‖ had established its veracity through an abjection of the Heraclitean
anarchy within its historical substructure.
Within this transition, St. Leon‘s conflicted emotional responses to gambling
manifest the implicit uncertainties within both aristocratic and bourgeois approaches to
gambling. Following Thomas Kavanagh‘s discussion of the rise of gambling among the
French nobility in the sixteenth century, critics such as Justine Crump, Gregory Maertz,
and Paul Hamilton point out that cultural attitudes towards gambling are symptomatic of
an ―epochal‖ displacement from the stratified, hierarchical structure of feudal society
towards a market economy based on liberal and utilitarian principles.80 At least initially,
gambling is perceived by the aristocracy as a means of reaffirming ―its prestige and its
independence of any limiting financial considerations‖ (Crump, ―Gambling,
Contingency, and Godwin‘s St. Leon‖ 397). With the emergence of a new commercial
model that measures wealth through accumulation and the efficient use of resources
rather than on a social hierarchy predicated on rank and in the archē of the King as God‘s
representative on earth, reckless expenditures through gambling dangerously exposed the
nobility to the possibility of social decline: ―money itself had become the most crucial
signifier, interchangeable for ‗all that‘s desirable‘‖; hence, ―in the new commercial
world, ‗Distinction‘ itself was a marketable commodity. If rank, influence, and power
were to be bought, to fritter away the means for such elevation in gambling was a
culpable error‖ (Crump, ―The Perils of Play‖ 15). As Georges Bataille observes, for the
classical theorists of utility who challenged the social logic of aristocratic distinction,
―the most appreciable share of life is given as the condition . . . of productive social
80
Maertz (1993) interprets St. Leon as an allegorical representation of the epistemological transition from
alchemy to chemistry as well as the economic shift from feudalism to capitalism. My own reading is closer
to Crump‘s suggestion that St. Leon is not allegorical but ―explicit . . . in its account of paradigm shifts‖
and therefore constitutes a ―conscious programme designed to expose the essential contingency of these
paradigms‖ (―Gambling, History, and Godwin‘s St. Leon‖ 405). See also Kavanagh, 42; Hamilton (2003),
79.
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activity.‖ Thus, ―pleasure, whether art, permissible debauchery, or play, is definitively
reduced‖ (117). Commercial society recognizes only ―the right to acquire, to conserve,
and to consume rationally, but . . . excludes in principle nonproductive expenditure‖;
that is, any expenditure that is not ―the minimum necessary for the conservation of life
and the continuation of individuals‘ productive activity‖ (Bataille 118). Hence, utilitarian
writers such as Bentham argue that deep play is pernicious to the calculus through which
the greatest happiness is determined for the greatest number. As Bentham writes in his
1802 Theory of Legislation, in deep play the utility of what one stands to gain from the
wager is always radically disproportionate to the disutility of what one stands to lose, so
that ―if I gain, my happiness is not doubled with my fortune; if I lose, my happiness is
destroyed; I am reduced to indigence‖ (106n).
The disutility of deep play is not only linked to fiscal concerns, but also to a
strictly regulated utilitarian economy of ―happiness‖ that, as Rajan argues, becomes
manifest in the emerging institution of the nineteenth-century ―Novel‖ and its postMalthusian ―fear of debt and bankruptcy‖ (Romantic Narrative 151).81 Within this
utilitarian ethos, gambling becomes less a means for the nobility to assert their rank than
a pathology that opens the way to distinctively anarchistic social effects. As St. Leon
avers, ―gaming, when pursued with avidity, subverts all order and forces every avocation
from the place assigned to it‖ (102). More specifically, the phenomenon of gambling
foregrounds the way in which the new bourgeois commercial paradigm made possible a
―random and meaningless redistribution of wealth‖ that actively ―threatened to subvert
the ascendancy of the ruling classes.‖ While early eighteenth-century moralists had
predominantly ―expressed their fears for aristocratic gamblers who risked their wealth,‖
those writing in the revolutionary period began expressing ―a fear of elite gamblers . . . as
an explicitly political menace to the state‖ (Crump, ―The Perils of Play‖ 16). Such
moralists viewed the Jacobin adherence to universal principles of pure reason that would
assert the formal equivalence of every individual akin to the gambler‘s worship of
chance. Burke explicitly links social anarchy with gaming when he writes that the ―great
81
Rajan (2010) specifically locates this economic fear in Victorian novelists such as Dickens. See 148-55.
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object‖ of republican politics in making all men theoretically equal was ―to
metamorphose France, from a great kingdom into one great play-table, and to turn its
inhabitants into a nation of gamesters‖ (Reflections 362).82
The gambler was also commonly linked with a philosophical perspective that
extended from economic and social concerns to a cosmology that unmoored the very
foundations of being itself. In particular, deep play became regularly linked with the
figure of the ―Epicurean,‖ a purveyor of the atomist philosophy of Epicurus. Fielding, for
instance, explores the confluence of Epicurean philosophy with gambling through the
character of Booth in Amelia (1751), a novel which, according to his diary, Godwin had
read in late October 1799.83 Epicureanism, a forerunner to both skepticism and
empiricism and what Louis Althusser would later call ―aleatory materialism,‖ envisions a
universe whose origins and progress are an-archically contingent.84 The Epicurean
universe is based on the chance irruption of an infinitesimal swerve or clinamen that
breaks the parallel fall of atoms, which in turn generates the formation of existing entities
against the background of a void. Althusser points to how Epicurean philosophy discloses
an an-archic ―non-anteriority of meaning‖ in which creation is the product of unexpected
―encounters‖ rather than pre-existing laws (169). As such, the gambler figures into an
ideological matrix that indicates not only moral ―anarchy,‖ but also the ontological
anarchē associated with the atomist clinamen, whose status as an infinitesimal change or
differential in the direction of an atom‘s downward fall approximates Godwin‘s sense
that ―a single grain of sand more or less on the surface of the earth, would have altered its
motion‖ (―HR‖ 467).
82
In a similar vein, clergyman Jeremy Collier‘s Essay on Gaming (1713, 1720) perceives the professional
gamer as ―instructed in the Leveling doctrine‖ of Wat Tyler and Jack Straw, the proto-anarchist leaders of a
Peasants‘ Revolt in the late fourteenth century, while Eliza Haywood‘s Female Spectator (1745) satirized
both the Jacobin and the gambler by describing a visit to an ―Topsy-Turvy Island‖ where ―All Ages, all
Degrees, all Sects . . . all Reserve – all Pride of Birth – all Difference in Opinion is here entirely laid aside‖
in their ―Adoration to the Goddess Fortune‖ (qtd. in Crump 8).
83
See also Crump (2000).
84
As Sylvia Berryman points out in her entry on ―Ancient Atomism‖ for the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, Epicurus and Lucretius argue that ―all perception is true‖ or that knowledge comes from the
senses since sensible knowledge is caused by the impact of a ―film‖ of atoms sloughed off by external
objects. Likewise, Epicurus skeptically endorses the possibility of multiple valid explanations for certain
phenomena, ―acknowledging that we may have no evidence for preferring one explanation over another.‖
On the connection between ancient atomism and ―aleatory materialism‖ see Althusser (2006).
133
As a symbol for the destruction of traditional social ties through an exposure of
the ―non-anteriority‖ of their meaning, the gaming table was also viewed as a distorted
simulacrum of intersubjective relations that endangers both the welfare of the individual
gambler as well as that of his neighbour. The gambler thus appears within much
eighteenth-century moral discourse as an ―isolated individual, denying his . . . familial
ties, as well as his social and economic responsibilities.‖ It is ―in this perceived
singularity,‖ Crump observes, that ―we may locate the root of the threat‖ that the gambler
represents:
In an age when value, social rank, and even language achieved meaning only
through relational networks, in circulation, the gambler‘s apparent isolation
presented a perilous problem. . . . By withdrawing himself from ‗circulation‘ in a
social or emotional sense, the gambler called into question a social system in
which selfhood could only be inferred by its relation to money, rank, and family
ties. The potential for chaos is apparent. The gambler, as conceived by the
moralists, is a spectre: a deracinated . . . amoral – ‗unsocial‘ – individual. (21)
For eighteenth-century moral writers, the gambler functions as a simulacrum that
discloses a palpable anxiety towards the excesses generated by and within the emerging
bourgeois commercial structures that sought to control or expel their effects. Instead, not
unlike Godwin‘s inquiry into the ―disquietingly random processes‖ that underwrite
consciousness in Political Justice, the gambler figure exposes the anarchē ―that lay
behind the new speculative financial practices,‖ threatening to disrupt the ―visible,
orderly circulation of capital‖ (Crump, ―The Perils of Play‖ 11; ―Gambling, History, and
Godwin‘s St. Leon‖ 402). Although eighteenth-century moral discourse abjects the
gambler as an ―external‖ figure through which a utilitarian economics stabilizes its own
moral and social institutions, the an-archic randomness of ―play‖ makes explicit the
groundlessness of the very founding gesture of this moral economics, arising as a
Blakean contrary, to borrow Pfau‘s terms, ―surfacing within and disrupting the masternarrative of [an emerging] nineteenth-century liberalism‖ (―The Melancholic Gift‖). The
gambler is not merely an ―anarchist‖ in the narrow sense of threatening social disorder,
but a more an-archic negativity that is also, in some sense, critical: the gambler, as St.
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Leon puts it, is a ―malignant genius‖ that haunts the margins of moral and speculative
commercial norms with the non-anteriority of their foundations (97).
Godwin deploys the an-archic framework within St. Leon to similar effects. St.
Leon first sees gambling as a form of nonproductive expenditure that reaffirms his place
within the aristocratic hierarchy. Gambling appears as a cultural practice ―in which . . . a
man‖ can ―display his fortitude,‖ and ―when gracefully pursued,‖ exemplifies ―the
magnanimity of the stoic, combined with the manners of a man of the world‖ (78). St.
Leon‘s social rank is not only determined by the possession of wealth, but also on the
aristocratic privilege of periodically relinquishing this wealth in ―unproductive social
expenditures such as . . . games‖ (Bataille 123). Thus, although St. Leon‘s indiscriminate
spending drains his hereditary coffers, gambling ―did not tarnish [his] good name‖: ―I
was universally ranked among the most promising and honourable of the young
noblemen of France‖ (80).
Under the ―liberal benevolence‖ of Marguerite‘s father the Marquis de Damville,
however, St. Leon‘s attitude towards gambling shifts from ―stoic magnanimity‖ to a
―struggle of conscious guilt and dishonour‖ (94, 97). The Marquis becomes a spokesman
for the principles of a bourgeois economics, whose privileging of ―reason and common
sense‖ (77), ―parsimony‖ and ―frugality‖ (97), reverses the value of deep play so that it
appears as a moral vice. Determined to curb St. Leon‘s reckless expenditures, the
Marquis stresses adherence to a ―rigid economy‖ that scrupulously avoids ―idle pomp and
decoration‖ (96, 93), which, in the eyes of the Marquis‘ quintessentially liberal ethos, can
only appear as a ―monstrous deformity‖ (82) Tacitly evoking the rejection of gambling
within a utilitarian economy that exposes the aristocrat to downward social mobility, the
Marquis warns St. Leon against the dangers of nonproductive expenditure in a society
―where attention and courtship are doled forth with scales of gold‖ (83). In turn, the aim
of St. Leon‘s gambling changes from the disinterested display of wealth to a desire to
recover his losses and improve his social standing. Unable to resist the lures of the table,
St. Leon now plays for the ―express purpose of improving his circumstances,‖ a purpose
that he readily admits to be idiotic for staking his very survival on the turn of a card (98).
Echoing Bentham, St. Leon laments how deep-play works the gambler‘s ―hopes . . . into
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a paroxysm‖ before an ―unexpected turn arrives, and he is made the most miserable of
men‖ (99).
Godwin likewise discloses how gambling functions as a simulacrum of ―proper‖
social relations of sympathy and benevolence that become central to his discussion of the
domestic affections. Unlike the soldier, who fights with ―a man with whom he has no
habits of kindness,‖ the gambler ―robs, perhaps, his brother, his friend . . . or, in any
event, a man seduced into the snare with all the arts of courtesy, and whom he smiles
upon, even while stabs‖ (77). In warfare one not only battles with strangers and defends
oneself against personal harm, but one is also capable of differentiating friend from
enemy – although, as mentioned above, Godwin reveals that this is not always the case.
While the blurring of sides in warfare momentarily annihilates all distinction into
Heraclitean randomness, gambling can be considered even more an-archic precisely
because it underhandedly simulates the ―orderly circulation‖ of sympathetic sociability,
rather than erasing it altogether. Gambling becomes a simulacrum of the ethical ground
of the social for eighteenth-century moral philosophy, as in the explications of sympathy
found in Hume and Adam Smith, a perspective that Godwin will more radically
deconstruct in Mandeville. For such thinkers, sympathy functions as the social glue that
enables individuals to interact in positive, ethical ways through an affective attunement to
the good of others: ―the sentiments of others can never affect us, but by becoming, in
some measure, our own; in which case they operate on us, by opposing, and encreasing
[sic] our passions, in the very same manner, as if they had been originally deriv‘d from
our own temper and disposition‖ (Hume 378). However, as David Marshall argues,
because eighteenth-century moral philosophy predominantly defines sympathy as an
attempt at replicating another‘s sentiments in one‘s own mind, sympathy is ―already an
aesthetic experience . . . in the realm of fiction, mimesis‖ (21). By highlighting the
disjunction between a fictive surface and a ―depth‖ of hidden, potentially subversive
motivations, deep-play throws into relief how the sympathetic affections can become
indiscernible from simulacra. In Deleuze‘s terms, gambling articulates how the
simulacrum is built upon an an-archic ―disparity or upon a difference. It interiorizes a
dissimilitude‖ and ―produces an effect of resemblance‖ in which sympathy cannot be
grounded by a benevolent or universal principle. Like the simulacrum, gambling pretends
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to a model of sympathy while following ―a model of the Other, from which there flows
an internalized dissemblance. . . . That to which they pretend . . . they pretend to
underhandedly, under cover of . . . a subversion, ‗against the father‘‖ (Deleuze, Logic of
Sense 258).
5.2 Archē-Oikos: The Domestic Affections
Because the simulacrum is by definition ―against the father,‖ St. Leon‘s ungovernable
passion for gaming eventually causes him to neglect his domestic responsibilities,
culminating in the loss of his family fortune. Domesticity, manifested in the ―angelic
goodness‖ (105) of Marguerite, serves as the emotional correlate of the Marquis‘
bourgeois economics, and the archē-oikos around which the novel attempts to neutralize
the groundlessness of deep play. As the Marquis comments, it is only by retiring within
the ―circle of [his] own hearth‖ that St. Leon will ―be found no contemptible or
unbeneficial member of the community at large‖ (84, 93). Where the Marquis councils
fiscal prudence in line with the ―rigid economy‖ predicated on utility against the
unproductive expenditure that sees money annexed to contingency, Marguerite entreats
her new husband to ―dismiss [the] artificial tastes‖ of chivalry for the common sense
―dictates of sentiment or reason,‖ for ―the moderate man is the only free‖ (123, 124).
Despite such warnings, St. Leon returns to the gaming-table in Paris and, in a
final paroxysm of gaming, brings his family to ruin. In their subsequent exile to
Switzerland, however, Marguerite perceives the family‘s sudden pecuniary modesty is
morally beneficial: ―the splendour in which we lately lived has its basis in oppression. . . .
I put in my claim for refinements and luxuries; but they are the refinements and purifying
of intellect, and the luxuries of uncostly, simple taste‖ (124). ―With a soul almost
indifferent, between the opposite ideas of riches and poverty‖ (88), Marguerite appears as
the epitome of the bourgeois subjectivity and regulated human behaviour emphasized by
a female Romantic tradition Anne Mellor identifies with an ―ethic of care.‖ According to
Mellor, an ethic of care ―insists on the primacy of the family or the community and their
attendant practical responsibilities‖ and promotes ―a social change that extends the values
of domesticity into the public realm‖ (3). Care adopts a Burkean model of society rooted
in the household, albeit away from Burke‘s emphasis on patriarchy. For Burke, the
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domestic is the ―germ . . . by which we proceed toward a love of our country and to
mankind‖: ―We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which
nature teaches us to revere individual men; on account of their age; and on account of
those from whom they are descended‖ (Reflections 202, 185). Wollstonecraft likewise
sees the family as a fundamental structure upon which to model society. Contrary to
Burke, however, Wollstonecraft posits reason rather than tradition as the ―natural‖
inheritance of the individual, which facilitates a ―model of political authority‖ based ―on
the egalitarian rather than patriarchal family‖ and ―the equality – and perhaps even the
superiority – of the female in creating and sustaining the domestic affections and, by
extension, the health and welfare of the family politic‖ (Mellor 66-7).
Although more closely associated with liberal or reformist traditions, Godwin‘s
representation of care in St. Leon contains the logical germ of a later anarchism grounded
in the conviction that humanity possesses an inherently moral or rational essence, what
Newman identifies as classical anarchism‘s broader capitulation to a ―harmony model of
human relations‖ that ―opposes the natural authority of society to the ‗artificial‘
authority‖ of institutions (44, 50). Temporarily swayed by Marguerite‘s influence, St.
Leon goes against the grain of Godwin‘s empiricism to claim the existence of ―intrinsic
qualities . . . that of which power cannot strip us, and which adverse fortune cannot take
away‖ (130), while appealing to a ―gratification‖ consisting of ―inartificial, unbought
amusements‖ (138). St. Leon‘s praise of ―intrinsic qualities‖ recalls Caleb‘s insistence on
a hypostasized or instituted notion of a ―simple nature‖ beyond both institution and the
vicissitudes of circumstance. Insofar as the domestic arranges a space in which not a
single ―article‖ does not ―rest its claim to be there upon a plea of usefulness‖ (265), the
household becomes the microcosm for the ―great principle of harmony in the universe,‖
the archē upon which ―human life‖ can be viewed ―in all its parts regularly and
systematically connected‖ (217, 193). Hence, Godwin frequently refers to the domestic in
the novel as a ―circle‖ that incipiently contains and is contained by the greater circularity
of an organic and harmonious totality: ―We were formed to suffice to each other within
our little circle‖ (265).
138
While providing an egalitarian alternative to aristocratic patriarchy, the
sentimentality associated with the domestic affections remains profoundly conservative
in restating a ―harmony model‖ of society with reference to (feminine) sentiment or care
rather than (masculine) reason. According to G.A. Starr, sentimental novels largely pose
the domestic as ―an appealing alternative, but not . . . a real threat‖ to the ―existing
scheme of things‖: ―despite the presence of various egalitarian motifs,‖ sentiment largely
functions as ―an emblem of the ultimate stability . . . of the status quo‖ (191-4).
Moreover, insofar as the domestic claims to be self-sufficient, it can also serve as ―a
haven secure from the world‖ (Starr 194) that could be interpreted as equally ahistorical
and autonomized. Since the domestic maintains its autonomy only, as St. Leon avers, in
erecting a barrier that separates ―us from all that is new, mysterious, and strange‖ (143),
Godwin also implies that domesticity can operate as a form of autonomization that
retreats from the ―gamble‖ necessary to effect political justice (Rajan, Romantic
Narrative 149). Although insisting on the natural priority of the domestic affections,
Godwin also discloses something of this conservatism, and perhaps his own ambivalence
towards the domestic as a sufficient alternative to things as they are.
Though Godwin stresses the positive attributes of the domestic, he also portrays
these attributes ambivalently in describing them as forms of ―self-complacency and selfsatisfaction‖ (85), terms that can have both positive and negative connotations. Godwin
gestures to this ambiguity in a later essay titled ―Of Self-Complacency‖ in Thoughts on
Man, which returns to his prior discussion of ―voluntary actions‖ in Political Justice.
While self-complacency is aligned with ―the feeling of self-approbation . . . found
inseparable from the most honourable efforts and exertions in which mortal men can be
engaged,‖ Godwin also suggests that this feeling is coextensive with the ―delusive sense
of liberty‖ that accompanies all our ―voluntary actions‖; that is, complacency includes an
awareness that subjective agency is a fictive (re)construction rather than its foundation
(343; emphasis mine). At points, St. Leon suggestively apprehends the negative
connotations of this self-complacency through the appearances of the positive, observing
that Marguerite‘s stoic optimism, while admirable, betrays a tendency to accept things as
they are, even in the face of absolute poverty: ―Her patience I considered a little less than
meanness and vulgarity of spirit. It would have become her better, I thought, like me, to
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have cursed her fate, and the author of that fate; like me, to have spurned indignant at the
slavery to which we were condemned; to have refused to be pacified‖ (120)
Equally ambiguous is Godwin‘s portrayal of the domestic affections both as the
natural, moral archē of society and also as a figurative construction without ―substance.‖
Marguerite herself is focalized through a narrative voice that renders her a textual
construct woven out of the writings of Petrarch, Dante, and ―the letters of Eloisa and
Abelard‖ (86, 105). But Godwin also frames the harmonious world of the domestic in a
rhetoric that implies aspects of self-mystification that refer back to the mimetic structure
of sympathy articulated by Hume and Smith: for it is only within a ―happy age of
delusion‖ that St. Leon is ―capable of a community of sentiments‖ (189). This fiction
admits a certain bad faith into the novel‘s representation of the domestic, highlighting its
status as a temporary ―forgetfulness of anxious care‖ (266) akin to the transient intervals
of tranquillity to which Godwin had limited the scope of ―truth‖ in his revisions to
Political Justice. Within the revised context of a skeptical epistemology that disclosed
flux as the an-archic a priori of the subject and of ―necessity‖ itself, the harmonious
qualities of domestic care appear as what Frederic Jameson calls a ―symbolic resolution,‖
or, in the language of Political Justice, the ―simplification‖ of an underlying flux (42). As
Godwin‘s references to Petrarch and Dante imply, the domestic can be read as troping a
social text whose organic harmony simplifies underlying psychic, social, and historical
antagonisms, and must therefore be interpreted critically.
Godwin registers a level of psychic antagonism through St. Leon‘s unaccountable
distaste for his ostensibly achieved domestic happiness. St. Leon‘s perverse resistance to
happiness during his time as a manual labourer in Switzerland are most explicitly linked
to his aristocratic prepossessions, what St. Leon calls his ―spark of true nobility‖ (120) .
Nonetheless, Godwin also indicates that St. Leon‘s prepossessions are not absolutely
determining, but rather give symptomatic shape to a more unreadable, an-archic ―will‖
that subtends its conscious and explicitly ideological representations. Like the ―fatal
impulse‖ that guides Caleb‘s unquenchable curiosity, St. Leon speaks of his ―ambition‖
as a restless ―passion pent up within me,‖ ―an uneasiness, scarcely defined in its object‖
that ―burns for something more unambiguous and substantial‖ (61, 200). This anxiety
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ceaselessly resurfaces to unsettle his domestic tranquility: ―I might learn to be
contented,‖ writes St. Leon, but ―I was not formed to be satisfied in obscurity and a low
estate‖ (137). But St. Leon‘s anxiety is not entirely reducible to his guilt over the
recklessness and ideologically motivated forms of aristocratic self-aggrandizement in
warfare and deep play. Another dimension of St. Leon‘s ―ambition‖ also emerges in his
confrontation with abject poverty in Switzerland, a crisis brought about by natural events
that no longer appear guided by a principle of harmony but rather appear closer to
Political Justice‘s image of a more an-archic universe governed by ―vicissitude‖ (PJ
1:453). Deploying the Gothic trope of nature as sublime violence, a freak storm destroys
St. Leon‘s meager crop, leaving the family on the brink of starvation. While Marguerite
maintains a stoic sense of domestic duty in caring for her dejected husband while
upholding a sense of ―hope and prospects,‖ St. Leon acknowledges how such hopes may
actually obscure the desperation of their actual circumstances: ―‗You talk idly of the
future, while the tremendous present bars all prospect to that future. We are perishing by
inches. We have no provision for the coming day! No, no; something desperate,
something unthought of, must be attempted!‖ (St.L147). In this instance, the text
questions the ―complacency‖ of domestic values whose positing as archē produces a
certain closure of the future. Indeed, in order to avoid becoming a mere repetition of
things as they are, this future necessarily remains ―unthought‖ and thus calls for some
form of ambition, a gamble implicitly connected with Godwin‘s emphasis on
experimentation, that the domestic forecloses by definition with its emphasis on scarcity
and accumulation.
On the level of social and historical antagonism, Godwin also unsettles the
domestic ―harmony model‖ of relations by figuratively associating it with Switzerland,
which renders St. Leon‘s pastoral life an ideologeme85 coextensive with Godwin‘s
criticisms of national character and repressive government regulation in ―Of History and
Romance‖ and Political Justice. As Rajan points out, Godwin did not share the view of
85
I use this term in Jameson‘s sense of a ―conceptual or semic complex which can project itself variously
in the form of a ‗value system‘ or . . . in the form of a protonarrative, a private or collective narrative
fantasy‖ (102).
141
Republican thinkers who identified Switzerland as a realized social utopia (Romantic
Narrative 145, 147).86 Thus, although St. Leon describes Switzerland‘s natural landscape
as eliciting a sense of a ―great principle of harmony‖ in the universe, the text goes on to
deconstruct this harmony by exploring ―Switzerland‖ as a political signifier in which the
archē-oikos of domestic care is implicitly connected with Swiss government‘s
xenophobic laws. When his crops are destroyed, St. Leon is refused the government
compensation provided to his neighbours simply because he is a foreigner: ―I advanced
my claim with the rest. . . . The harsh and rigorous answer I received was, that they had
not enough for their own people, and could spare nothing to strangers. Upon this occasion
I was compelled to feel what it was to be an alien‖ (132). As a result, St. Leon loses his
property and, shortly thereafter, finds himself imprisoned under false pretences (153-4).
By locating the romance of domestic care within the shared ideological ―environment‖ of
the oppressive and ethnocentric policies of the Swiss government, Godwin discloses a
dimension of social, economic and political dislocations that undermines the text‘s overt
positing of the domestic as an archē uncontaminated by the vicissitudes of history. St.
Leon‘s experience in Switzerland foregrounds how the term ―domestic‖ cuts across both
the private and public spheres; Godwin had also used the term in the 1798 edition of
Political Justice to describe both ―man in his individual character . . . the pursuits and
attachments which his feelings may lead him to adopt‖ as well as ―principles of . . .
domestic policy,‖ reflecting Godwin‘s sense that institution is not merely an ―external‖
imposition on subjects but rather ―insinuates itself in our personal dispositions, and
insensibly communicates its own spirit to our private transactions‖ (PJ 1:3, 12, 4).
Deeply intertwined with the private, institution renders it difficult to pinpoint the
―benevolent‖ source of the domestic affections, and thus equally difficult to predict the
ways in which these affections will manifest, both psychically and socially.
Godwin further complicates any straightforward acceptance of the domestic as the
moral archē of the novel when he later re-introduces St. Leon‘s estranged son, Charles.
In the early stages of the novel, Charles is clearly presented as his mother‘s son, the
86
Rajan cites Helen Maria Williams‘ Tour of Switzerland (1798) as one such example of how Rational
Dissenters saw Switzerland as a ―Republican utopia‖ (147).
142
byproduct of a domestic education in care and stoic resolve. Even on the brink of
starvation in Switzerland, the nine year-old Charles echoes his mother‘s unshaken
confidence in an existence governed by a benign principle: ―‗I know that God is good;
but for all that, one must not expect to have every thing one wishes. Though God is good,
there are dreadful misfortunes in the world, and I suppose we shall have our share of
them‘‖ (144). Charles likewise advocates a domestic ideal of sympathetic disclosure
between family members so that, as St. Leon says of his own relationship to Marguerite,
all ―distance vanishes, [so that] one thought animates, one mind informs them‖ (86). On a
tour of France, the sixteen year-old Charles thus berates his father for refusing to divulge
the source of his recovered wealth, arguing that ―a just and a brave man acts fearlessly
and with explicitness . . . he lives in the face of day, and the whole world confesses the
clearness of his spirit‖ (209). Such explicitness echoes Godwin‘s view in Political Justice
that ―unreserved communication‖ is necessary in the ―pursuit of truth.‖ Explicitness,
Godwin argues, is of ―unquestionable advantage‖ because it avoids a ―duplicity‖
designed to ―keep up the tenor of conversation, without disclosing of either our feelings
or opinions‖ (PJ 1:294). In refusing to ―assign the source of this extraordinary accession‖
(St.L 162), St. Leon appears guilty of a duplicity that would install a ―cold reserve that
keeps man at a distance from man,‖ predictably ending with Charles‘ estrangement (PJ
1:294).
Yet, Charles‘ domestic education is curiously offset by his later reappearance in
the text as a member of the Crusaders, suggesting that the former is less exemplary of a
―principle of harmony‖ in the universe than a historically situated system of values that is
both contingent and capable of generating unexpected, even regressive, effects. Charles
returns to the narrative when he liberates St. Leon from the dungeons of Bethlem Gabor.
Not recognizing his father, who had taken the elixir of youth prior to arriving in Hungary
and now appears younger than his own son, Charles rebukes the former St. Leon‘s
attempts to rescue the Hungarian populace from famine ―at a time when, but for his
inauspicious interference . . . perhaps every strong town in Hungary, were on the point of
falling into the hands of the Christians‖ (415). Charles has, in essence, become what St.
Leon had been as a youth in the French army, a ―muster-roll of a man‖ (85) whose values
St. Leon himself has reconsidered and subsequently left behind. Moreover, Charles‘
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cavalier attitude towards his father‘s attempt to bolster Hungarian independence exhibits
little of the ―care‖ that formed the cornerstone of his domestic education. As Rajan
argues, in this scene it is not St. Leon who appears immoral, but rather Charles himself,
―who, despite epitomizing his mother‘s middle-class self-reliance . . . remains fixated in
the ethos of the Crusades‖ and thus within a general historical form of instituted thinking
that hypostasizes past values (171).
Though morally laudable, the domestic affections are not as unequivocal as they
appear in St. Leon. As the sentimental extension of a bourgeois economics that also
remains within the horizon of classical anarchism‘s harmony model of society, the
domestic affections tend towards what Bataille calls a ―restricted economy,‖ a closed
economy through which the bourgeois self preserves itself through accumulation in
conditions of scarcity, but also, as Derrida notes in his translation of Bataille‘s
terminology into an economy of signification, claims that all meaning can be accounted
for (Bataille, The Accursed Share 1: 39; Derrida, Writing and Difference 342-6).
Conversely, Godwin presents an image of the gambler as an element of nonproductive
expenditure that exposes the contingency of the domestic and utilitarian values by
rereading these values through an ―individual‖ which functions as the ―outside‖ or
repressed interior of these systems.
5.3 Reverse Transmutations: Alchemy and “Anarchy”
At the heart of the novel‘s exploration of anarchism‘s historical possibilities, however, is
not the ideological figure of the gambler but rather his romantic semblable, the alchemist.
Godwin‘s depiction of alchemy, which re-presents the historical figure of the gambler in
the form of a romance, now sets out to explore anarchism‘s (im)possibilities within the
historical.
Living in impoverished but pastoral conditions for six years, St. Leon‘s domestic
happiness is disturbed by the sudden appearance of Zampieri, a vagabond on the run from
the Inquisition who teaches St. Leon the secrets of the philosopher‘s stone and of
immortality. St. Leon‘s transformation from gambler to alchemist plays on a related set
of ideological associations within eighteenth-century scientific and moral discourse. By
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the time of St. Leon‘s 1799 publication, alchemy had been relegated to the status of a
pseudoscience, while moral discourse increasingly associated gambling and alchemy as
dangerous metaphors for revolutionary anarchy. For Burke, the Jacobin revolutionary is
also the ―alchymist and empiric,‖ reckless ―projectors‖ whose ―wild, visionary theories‖
of a utopia governed by reason alone effectively abandoned ―anything that is common‖ in
social and moral traditions (Reflections 341-2).87 Both gambling and alchemy refer to
symbolic activities that resist bourgeois models of production, what Lewis Call identifies
with anarchic forms of ―anti-production‖ (94). Gambling and alchemy mutually break
with normative models of rational exchange, and as such become the site of that which
cannot be exchanged within a domestic or utilitarian economy. According to Bernadette
Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers, similar criticisms were levied against sixteenthcentury alchemists such as Paracelsus, whose De Vita Longa (1566) and De
Transfigurione Metallorum Libellus (1593) were both familiar to Godwin.88 According to
Bensaude-Vincent and Stengers, Paracelsus himself was perceived as a kind of anarchist
in his opposition of ―the authority of [scholastic] doctrines to what he considered the
authority of experience,‖ and for seeing ―himself as an innovator in a future-oriented
field.‖ Paracelsian alchemy was seen to be anarchic precisely because it posed itself as a
kind of empiricism that privileged the experiential over established metaphysical and
religious institutions (A History of Chemistry 25-6).
In St. Leon, the ideological framework associated with alchemy initially evokes
Godwin‘s own prior conceptualization of ―reason‖ or ―justice‖ in its most speculative and
utopian form as an immutable, non-contingent archē. The conversion of base matter into
gold becomes an analogy for the human and social transfiguration envisioned by Godwin
in his Appendix ―On the Prolongation of Human Life,‖ with its hypothesis that the mind
87
For a more detailed discussion on ―projection‖ as a metaphor for speculation as ―theory‖ see Simpson
(1993). For the connections between gambling, speculation, and alchemy in St. Leon, see Rajan (2010),
150.
88
In their discussion of St. Leon in their general introduction to the first volume of Godwin‘s collected
works, Marilyn Butler and Mark Philp argue that Paracelsus serves as the basis of Godwin‘s
characterizations of both ampieri and St. Leon: like Godwin‘s fictional alchemists, Paracelsus was ―driven
by suspicion, bigotry, and intellectual enmities through Switzerland and southern Germany‖ (Collected
Novels and Memoirs 1:31). Godwin also dedicates a section to Paracelsus in his later history of the occult,
The Lives of the Necromancers (1834), 243-5.
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will eventually transcend and control matter and, correspondingly, transcend institutions:
Every thing that I see almost, I can without difficulty make my own. . . . ‗Wealth!
Thy power is unbounded and inconceivable. All men bow down to thee! The most
stubborn will is by thee rendered pliant as wax; all obstacles are melted down and
dissolved by the ardour of thy beams! The man that possesses thee, finds every
path level before him. . . . He can assign to every individual in a nation the task he
pleases, can improve agriculture, and establish manufactures, can found schools,
and hospitals, and infirmaries, and universities.‘ . . . Time shall generate in me no
decay. . . . [F]or me the laws of nature are suspended. (St.L 53, 187-8)
This passage evokes both Godwin‘s earlier speculations concerning anarchism as the
rational transcendence of matter, as well orthodox idealist and romantic tropes that see
the human imagination as capable of evaporating ―disagreeables‖89 and reordering reality
in accordance with its own desires. As Schelling writes of alchemy in his Stuttgart
Seminars, such a process culminates in ―an entirely healthy, ethical, pure, and innocent
nature . . . freed from all false being‖ (242). ―Triumphant over fate and time,‖ alchemy
decontaminates the body of history, sublimating the alloy of human finitude through a
knowledge that humanizes the Divine: ―He [the alchemist] possesses the attribute which
we are ascribed to the Creator of the universe: he may say to a man, ‗Be rich,‘ and he is
rich‖ (187). Collapsing the distance between intention and actualization, the alchemist
appears as the positing of an absolute self-presence of a logos or archē; or, as Michel
Chaouli puts it, alchemy ―performs the sort of total synthesis towards which the organicsymbolic notion of poetry strives‖ (84).
Yet, in making use of the ―false‖ or simulacral being of a gambler-turnedalchemist in an echo of his earlier Appendix, Godwin recalls his skeptical displacement
of reason in Political Justice in order to cast doubt on a rational perfection capable of
89
―Disagreeables‖ is Keats‘ term, from his well-known letter in which he writes that the ―excellence of
every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close
relationship with Beauty & Truth‖ (60). Alchemical metaphors for the imagination are well-known in
Romantic literature, especially Coleridge‘s famous description of the imagination as an alchemical process
of solve et coagula (dissolution and coagulation) in the Biographia Literaria. For a discussion of the
relationships between alchemy and romanticism, see Roberts (1997).
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bringing about a society without institution. Something of this doubt is signaled by
ampieri‘s description of alchemy‘s potential as ambivalent and reversible rather than
incipiently positive: ―God has given it for the best and highest purposes. . . . [But i]t
might be abused and applied to the most atrocious designs. . . . It might overturn
kingdoms, and change the whole order of human society into anarchy and barbarism‖
(St.L 165). Moreover, there is the curiously destitute appearance of Zampieri himself,
which causes St. Leon to question the esoteric foundations of his alchemical ―gift‖: ―why
was he so poor, possessing, as he pretended, inexhaustible wealth? Why was he unhappy,
with so great talents and genius, and such various information? . . . Never was there a
man more singular, and in whom were united greater apparent contradictions‖ (171, 165).
Like the gambler, the alchemist is presented as an asocial ―singularity‖ whose knowledge
is capable of subverting ―all order‖ and forcing ―every avocation from the place assigned
to it‖ (102). As a unity of contradictions, alchemy appears both as the ―unbounded‖
power of genius and an abject powerlessness, a possession that is also a dispossession.
Through such aporias, Godwin shows how the foundations of alchemy appear inherently
self-contesting, rather than generating the autonomous and autoaffective being envisioned
by St. Leon.
Godwin further discloses this essential uncertainty through alchemy‘s emphasis
on secrecy: ―the condition by which I hold my privileges‖ writes St. Leon, is ―that they
must never be imparted‖: ―I commit to this paper my history, and not the science of
which it is the corner-stone‖ (54, 186). St. Leon goes on to point out that he must also
conceal that he has any secrets to hide, inscribing the text with a doubly-negative writing
that not only hides, but simultaneously hides its own hiding (186). In Political Justice,
Godwin had criticized secrecy for generating a ―cold reserve‖ between individuals, as
opposed to the sympathetic communion of souls made possible through the domestic
affections. However, secrecy also produces a structural gap within the narrative voice that
directly conflicts with St. Leon‘s claim that his story is the very model of ―absolute truth
and impartiality‖ (88). If a narrative of ―absolute truth‖ by definition promises complete
disclosure, then St. Leon‘s fidelity to the ―great secret‖ renders his narration, as Paul
Hamilton remarks, ―systematically unreliable‖ (St.L 53; Hamilton 79).
Narrative unreliability overlaps with the conceptual unreliability of secrecy whose
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condition of possibility is also its impossibility. The secret, as St. Leon suggests,
functions as the condition of possibility for the positing of a utopian anarchism in history.
Yet, because the secret must remain secret, it becomes the index of its own impossibility
as posited historical ―truth‖: the secret makes possible the historical use of alchemy only
on the condition that it withdraws from history. For ―exhaustless wealth, if communicated
to all men‖ would lose all value and ―would be but an exhaustless heap of pebbles and
dust‖ (186). Godwin later reuses this formulation almost verbatim in his later discussion
of alchemy in his Lives of the Necromancers (1834),90 but it also refers back to ―Of
History and Romance,‖ specifically that essay‘s description of how the totalizing
methods of the general historian produces a ―mass‖ of particulars that ―crumbles from his
grasp, like a lump of sand . . . as fast as he endeavours to cement and unite it‖ (―HR‖
455).
Similar to general history‘s reduction of its materials to a single amorphous mass,
the universal positing of alchemical knowledge would produce a reverse transmutation in
which money itself would become worthless. Such destructive potential likewise recalls
Godwin‘s sense in Political Justice that the actual institution of perfection would, in fact,
put an end to perfectibility. Echoing the gradualism of the earlier text, St. Leon notes the
alchemist‘s role as a ―projector‖ interested only in achieving ―ultimate objects,‖ rather
than carefully considering ―the steps between.‖ This lack of consideration is ―an omission
of high importance,‖ since ―every thing in the world is conducted by gradual process‖
(193). Like gambling, alchemy circumvents the ―gradual process‖ of the universe in
bestowing immediate wealth without passing through the intermediaries of labour or
exchange, which, in Godwin‘s description, also implies a suspension of the laws of
nature. Because nature ―will not admit her everlasting laws to be so abrogated‖ (186), the
consequence of realizing that which perfectibility deems unrealizable exposes alchemy to
the possibility of a reverse transmutation in which, as Collings puts it, ―Godwin identifies
utopia with disaster‖ (―The Romance of the Impossible‖ 868).
By emphasizing the failures of St. Leon‘s (world-)historical projects, Godwin
90
―If the power of creating gold is diffused, wealth by such diffusion becomes poverty, and every thing
after a short time would but return to what it had been‖ (44).
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anticipates something of the post-anarchist critique of a classical anarchism‘s notion of a
―human essence constituting a pure revolutionary identity‖ as both ―dubious,‖ but also,
perhaps, ―. . . immanently dangerous‖ (Newman 52). Utopia becomes indiscernible from
anarchy in the adverse effects that follow whenever St. Leon attempts to directly apply
the romance of ―ultimate objects‖ to the vicissitudes of history. In the early stages of the
novel, St. Leon thus interprets alchemy in an ―institutional‖ way by focusing on his
prejudices. ampieri goads St. Leon into accepting the ―gift‖ of alchemical knowledge
through an appeal to his aristocratic and patriarchical prepossessions: ―‗Go, St. Leon!‘
added the stranger, ‗you are not qualified for so important a trust. . . . Go; and learn to
know yourself for what you are, frivolous and insignificant, worthy to have been born a
peasant, and not fitted to adorn the rolls of chivalry, or the rank to which you were
destined!‘‖ (165). Recalling his original reasons for gambling, St. Leon first sees alchemy
as a form of aristocratic exhibitionism, a ―golden key‖ that will ―unlock the career of
glory‖ and ―buy shouts and applause from all the world‖ (211). Eager to restore his
family to its former position within a social hierarchy whose foundations are secured by
wealth rather than heredity, St. Leon takes his son Charles on a tour of the German courts
so as to ―initiate him . . . in scenes of distinction and greatness‖ (202). Yet, St. Leon‘s
excessive display of wealth raises the suspicions of his peers, who question the
mysterious origins of St. Leon‘s sudden affluence in light of his shady reputation as a
ruined gambler in exile (204). St. Leon‘s subsequent refusal to account for the source of
his wealth provokes further disaster, estranging his son Charles and exacerbating a
growing rift with Marguerite that will end in her untimely death during childbirth.
After the death of his wife and his escape from execution at the hands of the
Spanish Inquisition, however, St. Leon attempts to deploy his alchemical knowledge
more productively and closer to the doctrines of benevolence and incremental change
argued in Political Justice. Now several years younger and travelling under the
pseudonym Chatillon, St. Leon sets out to rescue Turkish-occupied Hungary by investing
in a series of public-works projects (365). Unlike his earlier use of alchemy, St. Leon‘s
plan to bolster the Hungarian economy depends on subtlety rather than vulgar displays of
wealth: ―It was my purpose to stimulate and revive the industry of the nation: I was
desirous of doing this with the least practicable violence upon the inclinations and
149
freedom of the inhabitants‖ (364). Without any ―private or personal object in view‖
(377), St. Leon now attempts to practice alchemy at the level of individual history, that is
to say, as a micropolitics from within the diversified minutiae of a society, rather than
imposing it monolithically from outside. At the same time, in executing his ―plan of
public benefit‖ without permission from ―the sovereign of Constantinople,‖ St. Leon
finds himself classified as a political anarchist. As the Turkish bashaw comments, ―you
say, that you wish to be the benefactor of his subjects, and the judge of your own
proceedings: such sentiments are direct rebellion against the glorious constitution of
Ottoman‖ (376). St. Leon‘s philanthropy introduces a form of social benevolence
unsanctioned by political and religious institutions and, as such, threatens to expose the
―arbitrary character of . . . the maxims of the Turkish government‖ (377).
But Godwin goes on to demonstrate how even the most refined use of alchemy is
dissimulated by the vicissitudes of history that ―Of History and Romance‖ had identified
with the complex ―system of the world,‖ and Political Justice with the flux of
―necessity.‖ As in Caleb Williams, Godwin shows how the ―uncontaminated point of
departure‖ claimed by St. Leon becomes inscribed within the very institutions it wants to
transcend. While successful in implementing his alchemical stimulus package, St. Leon
generates an ―increase of . . . precious metals‖ (364) that results in massive inflation,
plunging the country back into poverty. When the Hungarian populace eventually turns
against him, St. Leon is then forced to appeal to the very government he had previously
undermined for protection (374-7, 394). A similar result occurs where St. Leon,
disillusioned by his failures at philanthropy, tries to befriend misanthropic noble Bethlem
Gabor. Manipulating St. Leon‘s desire for companionship, Gabor imprisons him and
offers him an unpalatable alternative: either reveal his secret, or supply Gabor and his
band of marauders – an inverted, Gothicized image of the virtuous robbers in Caleb
Williams – with an endless reserve of money to fund their murderous expeditions. St.
Leon‘s betrayal suggests that even the ―intrinsic‖ virtue of human benevolence against
the artifices of the state remains subject to the vicissitudes of power: ―When I became
sensible of the precarious situation in which I stood towards the powers of the state, could
I have fallen upon a more natural expedient, than the endeavour to cover myself with the
shield of friendship? . . . But this expedient would almost infallibly lead to the placing
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myself sooner or later in the power of the man whose friendship I sought‖ (394). Such
instances magnify Godwin‘s growing sense that there can be no rational principle capable
of detaching itself completely from the historical ―necessity‖ in which it is always
already caught up, anticipating Newman‘s post-anarchist view that ―morality, truth, and
knowledge do not enjoy the privilege of being beyond the grasp of power. They are not
pure sites uncontaminated by power but, on the contrary, are effects of power: they are
produced by power, and they allow power itself to be produced‖ (83). In St. Leon,
alchemy cannot achieve the status of a sovereign archē, but rather appears as an ―effect
of power‖ that deconstructs classical anarchism‘s desire to posit an essence prior to
existence. St. Leon‘s experiences in Hungary demonstrate how, in raising certain
attributes of the human to the status of an uncontaminated archē, classical anarchism
reintroduces the very forms of alienation it wants to overcome.
5.4 “The World is Open”: Alchemy and Anarchē
Like the original conclusion to Caleb Williams, the utopian disasters of St. Leon would
seem to acknowledge that the desire for an ―uncontaminated point of departure‖ is
inevitably self-destructive. St. Leon could then be read as an ironic meditation on the
failed logic of classical anarchism. After being rescued by Charles, St. Leon thus suggests
that he has exhausted the possibilities of his philosopher‘s stone, and will subsequently
abandon ―all ambitious and comprehensive views‖ (413). Moreover, St. Leon writes that
his miscarried attempts at becoming ―the benefactor of nations and mankind, not only had
been themselves abortive, but contained in them shrewd indications that no similar plan
could ever succeed‖ (413). It is difficult to read this passage and not see alchemy as an
analogue for the ―similar plan‖ of Political Justice, whose failure seems to have become
fait accompli with the conservative reaction against politically radical versions of
Enlightenment. In this respect, St. Leon exposes how classical anarchism‘s utopian
aspirations for a society without institutions is an ―abortion,‖ while St. Leon‘s decision to
abandon ―comprehensive views‖ would appear to anticipate the post-anarchist
repudiation of classical anarchism‘s essentialist meta-narrative.
However, in the passage above St. Leon also states that he only abandons his
speculative ambitions ―for the present‖ (413), gesturing to a perfectibility within alchemy
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also implicit in Bensaude-Vincent and Stengers‘ description of alchemy as a ―futureoriented field.‖ This perfectibility is evident in Godwin‘s reading of alchemical method
in his Lives of the Necromancers. Although Godwin acknowledges this method can
afford opportunities to the ―artful imposter,‖ he also sees potential in it as the historical
manifestation of a perfectibility that is still becoming. Foregoing the more extravagant
metaphysical claims of hermetic philosophy, Godwin describes alchemy as a radically
contingent and experimental ―gamble‖ in process:
The art . . . is in its own nature sufficiently mystical, depending on nice
combinations and proportions of ingredients, and upon the condition of each
ingredient being made in exactly the critical moment . . . and it was often found,
or supposed, that the minutest error in this respect caused the most promising of
appearances to fail of the expected success. . . . [Thus alchemy appeared] ever on
the eve of consummation, but as constantly baffled when . . . most on the verge of
success (43).
To borrow Chaouli‘s terms, Godwin‘s emphasis on the empirical, experimental, and
processual side of alchemy is to read alchemy ―chemically,‖ insofar as chemistry consists
in ―narrowing its scope to a finite set of elements and combinatorial operations that,
however, give rise to an infinity of possible objects‖ (84) rather than seeking the ―total
[alchemical] synthesis‖ of the human and the divine. Godwin‘s ―chemical‖ perspective
on alchemy in the Lives also brings it closer to his theory of individual history and
romance, in which the finite ―materials‖ are combined to disclose counter-factual
potentials through which history can be seen otherwise. In this respect, Godwin‘s
mention of alchemy discloses how history cannot be reduced to a closed order of facts in
which certain past forms of knowledge are simply identified as ―false‖; rather, the past
consists of potentials whose realization has been missed or only partially grasped.
Moreover, at several points in the novel itself Godwin actually refers to St. Leon as a
chemist or as studying chemistry (227, 266, 285, 354), suggesting that, like history and
romance, chemistry and alchemy cannot be divided into a simple opposition that would
sanction any straightforward application of an ―ethical sentence‖ to the text.
Thinking ―chemically‖ about alchemy, Godwin‘s novel persistently associates the
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latter with experimentation (218, 243, 245-6, 256, 359, 372), which repositions the
alchemist closer to the an-archic figure of the bricoleur rather than an engineer who
applies a pre-existing technology. Indeed, Rajan points out that if Godwin depicts
alchemy as a technology, the actual techne of St. Leon‘s alchemical practice, like the
absent foundations of the tale itself, is curiously missing from the text (171). The only
moment in which it appears as though the reader will be granted access to the technology
behind St. Leon‘s production of gold occurs when he is imprisoned by Bethlem Gabor.
Promising his captor ten thousand ducats, St. Leon asks Gabor to retrieve a chest that
ostensibly contains his ―great secret,‖ the philosopher‘s stone or a secret reserve of
treasure. Yet, St. Leon‘s chest contains ―not gold, but the implements for making and
fashioning gold‖: ―crucibles, minerals, chemical preparations, and the tools of an artist‖
(401-2). As in Godwin‘s later description of alchemy for the Lives, St. Leon‘s chest
contains finite implements whose use-value remains indeterminate and open to
speculation, receiving meaning only through and ―by the experiment‖ of their potential
combinations.
Not unlike the scenes surrounding Falkland‘s chest in Caleb Williams that
tantalize with the possibility of meaning rather than meaning itself, Gabor‘s ―sullen and
gloomy‖ (401) reaction to the instruments in St. Leon‘s chest begs the question as to
whether alchemy‘s ―great secret‖ actually hides a latent archē that would allow us to
institute the text, or if the secret rather functions as the absent cause for a foundation that
never existed as such. For in depriving the reader of the technological ―corner-stone‖ of
St. Leon‘s narrative, Godwin also deprives us of the archē that would allow us to fix its
meaning. Likewise, because St. Leon is forced not only to hide the secret but also to hide
that he has anything to hide, the double-negative raises the possibility that there may have
been nothing hidden in the first place, revealing what Schürmann calls the an-archic
―blank space‖ behind normative and hegemonic symbolic constructions of power. The
indeterminate set of implements and devices at the heart of St. Leon‘s secret suggests
what Colin Davis calls ―the experience of secrecy as such, an essential unknowing which
underlies and may undermine what we think we know‖ (377). In this context, the secret
becomes the ―productive opening of meaning‖ rather than a concealed ―determinate
content‖ to be recovered within the positive order of knowledge. The experience of
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secrecy as such presents the secret as a metaphor for that which is eminently ―absent
from its own place‖: the secret ―is not a puzzle to be solved‖ but rather ―the structural
openness or address directed towards . . . the not yet formulated possibilities of the
future‖ (Davis 377-8). The structural openness of the secret in turn yields the ―gamble‖ of
St. Leon‘s pursuit of an absolute that generates the potential for experimentation,
recalling Schlegel‘s definition of romance as something that ―can never be completed‖
because it is ―still becoming,‖ and Godwin‘s sense of the romance writer‘s ―straining at a
foresight to which his faculties are incompetent‖ (Schlegel 32; ―HR‖ 467). For if one of
the goals of the alchemist is to liberate the inner content or potential of natural processes
by transforming base matter into its opposite, alchemy also emancipates the form of
something that remains to be worked through.
If such potential seems largely absent from St. Leon‘s use of alchemy early in the
novel, the second half of the novel gestures in the direction of a more an-archic principle
of ―structural openness.‖ The death of Marguerite, St. Leon‘s final settling of accounts
with his daughters and the arrangement of his son‘s marriage, along with the gradual loss
of his identity as ―St. Leon‖ after taking the elixir of youth, casts his narrative as the
progressive ―unbinding‖ of the institutions of identity, ―nation and family‖ (Rajan,
Romantic Narrative 171): as St. Leon puts it after the death of his wife, ―I was
prematurely dead to my country and my race‖ (303). Reading the novel conservatively as
a rejection of anarchism for the domestic affections, Marguerite‘s untimely death exposes
St. Leon‘s self-serving ambitions and condemns his alchemy for destroying ―that
communion of spirit which is the soul of the marriage-tie‖: ―For a soldier you present me
with a projector and chemist, a cold-blooded mortal, raking in the ashes of a crucible for
a selfish and solitary advantage‖ (226-7). At the same time, however, if the character of
the domestic economy is to preserve itself by foreclosing ―all that is new, mysterious, and
strange‖ Marguerite‘s disappearance from the text is also a hinge, a moment of closure
that is simultaneously an opening that clears a space for something new to emerge.91
According to St. Leon, Marguerite‘s death constitutes ―the great crisis‖ (296) of his
history, a term which not only refers to a period of emotional difficulty but is also
91
On the double-logic of the hinge see Derrida (1998), 78-82.
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etymologically linked with decision, and therefore with a kind of freedom opened
through the individual‘s separation (cision) from institution. As St. Leon writes, ―my
being now alone, and detached from every relative tie, left me at liberty to pursue my
projects with bolder enterprise‖ (304). The freedom of this ―bolder enterprise‖ is no
longer that of the absolute freedom asserted by St. Leon earlier in the novel, a freedom
that would posit itself as universal archē. To the contrary, St. Leon now resolves to ―take
care‖ (304) in the deployment of his alchemical knowledge so as to make romance
responsible to the complex minutiae of history, while introducing possibility into a
history that might otherwise remain bound to things as they are.
Having secured both his daughters‘ inheritance and his son‘s marriage, Godwin‘s
conclusion shows St. Leon working free of the last of his ―relative ties‖ and continuing
his ―eternal‖ existence beyond the conclusion to the text itself. Unbound from the archē
of the patriarchical, national, familial, and racial identity that defines him earlier in the
novel, St. Leon manifests an anonymous existence that mirrors Caleb‘s loss of
―character‖ at the conclusion of Caleb Williams. Where Caleb loses his character in a
moment of ―magnetic sympathy‖ with Falkland that renders it impossible to clearly
distinguish justice from injustice, St. Leon‘s anonymity manifests the anarchē of an
equivocal, Protean existence that resists positing under a law of generality. As such, St.
Leon is not a character so much as a floating signifier through which Godwin critically
reflects upon the credibility of multiple positions throughout the novel and, in a
conclusion in which St. Leon addresses the as yet unformulated possibilities of the future.
St. Leon‘s continuance beyond the conclusion of the text gestures towards a future that
approximates what Derrida identifies with empiricism as a ―strategy without finality‖
engaged in ―calculations without end‖ (Margins of Philosophy 7), a structural openness
that allows the reader to speculate beyond the ―pleasing termination‖ of the narrative
(449). From a paradoxical ―position‖ outside things as they are, St. Leon enables a
critical perspective that sees history in terms of its potential – that is to say, the potential
also latent in romance as a means of seeing history becoming other than what it is.
In St. Leon Godwin discloses an anarchism caught up in the impossibility of its
own positing. Read with an eye to passing ―ethical sentence‖ on the novel, this
impossibility demonstrates the failure of any attempt at rearranging world-history by
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attempting to posit the ―romance‖ of classical anarchism directly within the complexity
and materiality of history. Yet, to acknowledge this impossibility does not simply put an
end to the need for political justice; rather, in St. Leon Godwin suggests that anarchism
and political justice must be rethought in the context of the dialogical relationship
between history and romance. Such rethinking also renders the ostensible domestic moral
of the novel up for questioning, while recasting perfectibility in the form of a potentiality
that appears more hopeful than in Godwin‘s previous novel. At the same time, however,
if St. Leon manifests an anarchism revised according to a principle of hope, this hope
must be read against the acknowledgement of its own absence of foundations, that its
realization is always somehow missed. As with Godwin‘s speculation on perfection in his
Appendix to Political Justice, the utopian dimension of his revised anarchism in St. Leon
necessarily shares in an an-archic negativity that remains skeptical of any affirmative
programme for a society. Yet, the conclusion of the novel suggests that the failure of
utopia paradoxically brings out the necessity of its survival in the hope that things might
be different than they are, a hope, moreover, that is always by definition a ―gamble‖ and
an experiment that generates possibilities out of its impossibility.
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Chapter 6
6
“Not Competent to Exercise those Rights . . . Claimed
by Every Sane Member of the Community”: Mandeville
“This essay is also out of touch with the times because here I am trying for once to see as
a contemporary disgrace, infirmity, and defect something of which our age is justifiably
proud, its historical culture”
-Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations
In St. Leon, Godwin deconstructs the utopian assumptions of his own philosophical
anarchism, a deconstruction already at work in both his revisions to Political Justice and
Caleb Williams. By making St. Leon into a figure for hope, however, Godwin‘s second
novel is a re-writing, albeit a skeptical one, of anarchism‘s utopian possibilities within the
domain of the counter-factual rather than an outright rejection of these possibilities.
Conversely, Godwin‘s late novel Mandeville, a tale of the seventeenth century marks his
most recessive foray into the ―closet‖ of individual history, and most radical
confrontation with the obscure face of the persona non grata in its dissensus with general
history, or, as one character names the title character near the conclusion of the novel, the
non ens (non-entity) and hors de cour (―dismissed case‖) ―not competent to exercise
those rights . . . claimed by every sane member of the community‖ (Mand. 318). As such,
Mandeville constitutes Godwin‘s most radical literary examination of what Newman
identifies with the post-anarchist ―war model‖ of social relations in which ―society itself
can have no stable meaning – no origin, and no grand dialectical movement towards
conclusion . . . free from conflict and antagonism.‖ Rather, this model discloses what
Mandeville himself will call the historical and social reality of ―eternal war,‖ or, as
Newman avers, ―the dark, turgid, violent struggle of silent forces; the conflict of the
multitude of representations which are precariously held in check by notions such as
human essence, morality, rationality, and natural law‖ (Mand. 124; Newman 51).
Published in 1817, Godwin‘s novel explores the afflicted psychology of Charles
Mandeville, a Royalist during the turbulent Cromwellian period of British history. At
three years old, Mandeville witnesses the slaughter of his parents in the Irish rebellion of
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1641, and is subsequently raised in the gloomy ancestral home of his shut-in uncle
Audley and educated by fiercely anti-Catholic minister Hilkiah Bradford. At Winchester
Academy, Mandeville first encounters the eloquent and popular Clifford, who becomes
his arch-nemesis and inadvertently thwarts Mandeville‘s every attempt to become
―something substantive in the dramatis personae of society‖ (Mand. 123). The novel
culminates in Clifford‘s proposed marriage to Mandeville‘s sister Henrietta, the only
character that Mandeville feels connects him to the world beyond his tortured psyche, and
climaxes with a violent encounter between the two rivals that accidentally leaves
Mandeville grotesquely scarred.
Possibly a reflection of Godwin‘s increasing financial destitution, the reactionary
political atmosphere, and the increasing insanity of George III, the dark focus of the
novel disappoints any sense of the romance or hope that can still be found at the
conclusion of St. Leon. Instead, Mandeville seems to emphasize what D.H. Monro calls
Godwin‘s literary focus on ―the wretchedness of the man . . . cut off from sympathetic
communion with his fellows‖ (7). Accordingly, critical reactions contemporary with the
novel invoked Mandeville‘s similarities with Byron‘s tortured and misanthropic loners,
whose similarly themed philosophical drama Manfred is published in the same year.
James Mackintosh‘s opinion in The Scots Review is paradigmatic, describing Mandeville
as ―an exposition of a mind radically diseased, and only very slightly acted upon by any
peculiarity of outward circumstances‖ (qtd. in Clemit, ―Introduction‖ 59). More recent
criticism has largely perceived the novel within this horizon. William Brewer cites
Mandeville‘s proximity to Rousseau‘s Confessions, arguing that ―Mandeville, like
Rousseau, is partly the victim of his own hyperactive imagination‖ and that his
unaccountable hatred of Clifford ―has no more basis in reality than Rousseau‘s delusion‖
that Diderot and the other French philosophes were secretly plotting to ruin him (Mental
Anatomies 55). Reading the novel through a psychoanalytic perspective, Handwerk
argues that Mandeville‘s hatred for Clifford is a displacement of the ―primary trauma‖ of
his childhood, and Godwin‘s text subsequently enacts a ―rigorously repetitive structure‖
that can be called ―genuinely insane‖: ―At every turn of events, the same ideological
oppositions recur, the same behavior results, the same outcome ensues – defeat and
frustration for Mandeville‖ (―History, trauma‖ 78-9). The final breakdown and
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confrontation with Clifford is read as ―a full erasure of historical consciousness, an
entrapment within an eternal, unvarying present‖ in which Mandeville ―blurs past and
present, seeing repetition everywhere and equating Henrietta and Clifford with their
historical types, the Duke of Savoy and his queen‖ (Handwerk 80; Mand. 316). For
Handwerk, Mandeville‘s interiority forecloses historical reality, such that the ―history
[that] repeats itself as Mandeville‘s tragedy‖ appears as ―farce‖ for the reader, while
Mandeville‘s attempt to explain his magnetic antipathy with Clifford through the image
of ―mysterious . . . properties interchangeably irreconcilable and destructive to each
other‖ is ―essentialized‖ and ―ahistorical‖ (Mand. 140; Handwerk 78, 80).
However, to conceive Mandeville as a pathological other attenuates Godwin‘s
insistence on the individual as the singular locus of the historical and deploys a standard
by which the pathological is judged from the perspective of the normal, privileging
Clifford‘s characterization of Mandeville as a dismissed case within the novel itself:
―‗Mandeville is sick; and we are well‘‖ (293). Focalizing the novel entirely as a product
of Mandeville‘s aberrant psyche has the effect of distancing the anarchē of the individual
and the historical in a manner that Godwin had resisted in ―Of History and Romance.‖
Moreover, this interpretation tends towards a reading in which the novel unfolds
teleologically, tracing the archē of a primal scene to its emergence as psychosis, a
process that always reaches a dead-end, insofar as it is only capable of understanding the
novel in terms of personal history rather than analyzing the contradictions that the
persona non grata is negatively capable of evoking within the historical itself.
This chapter argues, to the contrary, that Mandeville is not foreclosed from the
historical but rather serves as the index of a confrontation with the anarchē of history
through a persona non grata that challenges the reactive forces of counterrevolution and
Restoration ideology, exposing the deeply inegalitarian underside through which the
archē of the ―good‖ and the ―normal‖ are legitimized. In this context, it is not simply
Mandeville who is a pathological figure; rather, as Rajan argues, through the figure of
Clifford (and others) Godwin also expresses the pathology inherent in what defines itself
as the good, forcing his readers to perform a genealogy of morals (―The Disfiguration of
Enlightenment‖ 175). The anarchē proper to Mandeville‘s individual history might be
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said to follow closer to an observation made by Nerval: ―Melancholic hypochondria, it is
a terrible affliction – it makes one see things as they are‖; that is, it is Mandeville‘s
―abnormal‖ psyche that brings us face to face with the anarchē of history itself (qtd. in
Rosset, Joyful Cruelty 76). Consequently, even at the height of psychosis in his final,
violent confrontation with Clifford, Godwin will nonetheless connect Mandeville to the
―faceless‖ of history – the slaves of the West Indies (217). Mandeville gives voice to an
an-archic refusal of institutional positing, embodying a nonproprietary existence that
haunts civilization with its discontents.
Further, reducing Mandeville entirely to the pathological other neglects the
distinctive ―vitality‖ to which Godwin refers throughout the novel that allows Mandeville
to be thought as a figure of resistance: ―Could I then, sink, palsied and unresisting, under
this oppression? Ambition, as I have said, was the vital spirit, that fed my life, and
preserved my corporeal frame from putrefying. . . . I felt within me powers answerable to
this destination. I could not therefore, if I might, retire into a corner‖ (140). Far from sink
―unresisting‖ into a melancholic torpor that would shut him off entirely from the world
like his uncle, or succumb to the tepid happiness of the ―obscure and rural life‖
represented by Henrietta, Mandeville refuses any recourse towards a terminal state that
would dissipate the tension that constitutes his individuality (148). On the contrary,
Mandeville represents the an-archically excessive dimension of a historical individuality
that, in Nietzsche‘s terms, resists inclusion and thus challenges ―the universal, green
pasture happiness of the herd‖ and their desire for ―security, safety, contentment, and an
easier life for all‖ (Beyond Good and Evil 41). In this context, the repetition that informs
the novel is less a repetition of the same than expressive of a field of repeated struggles,
setbacks, and betrayals, a series of antagonisms that live on without the promise of
resolution, what Mandeville identifies as ―eternal war.‖
This chapter proceeds as follows. First, I investigate the ways Godwin establishes
the psychical interiority of the novel only to unsettle it, gesturing back in the direction of
Political Justice‘s emphasis on the contingency of external circumstances. I here follow
Rajan‘s suggestion that external circumstances render the ideological positions within the
novel difficult to locate, such that the history within the novel becomes a scene of
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perpetual dislocation (―The Disfiguration of Enlightenment‖ 177-8). I extend this notion
through Maurice Blanchot‘s sense of the ―neuter,‖ which characterizes the space of
literature as a radical displacement of the unified interiority of the self. Second, I
elaborate on the ways in which Godwin distinguishes Mandeville from what I am calling
institutional ―types‖ within the novel, Audley and Hilkiah, who both represent specific
figures within a genealogy of morals. I connect this typology into a discussion of what
Godwin calls ―rebelliousness‖ in an essay in Thoughts on Man, in which Godwin begins
to think of a non-rational anarchē within human nature itself. I argue that this essay,
largely ignored by critics, is crucial to a discussion of Mandeville and the vitality within
Mandeville‘s refusal of the different types of stasis that Audley and Hilkiah represent in
the novel. Third, I focus on Mandeville‘s relation to Clifford, who functions as the most
contemporary figure in the novel‘s genealogy of morals. I argue that Clifford embodies a
sympathetic morality of happiness and universal inclusivity that characterizes modern
liberal-democratic values symbolized through Restoration ideology. ―Restoration‖ here
refers both to the re-establishment of the monarchy on the accession of Charles II in 1660
after the collapse of the Commonwealth, as well as a theoretical-political force of
regression. I then investigate how Godwin‘s comparison of Mandeville with the
―weeping philosopher‖ Heraclitus poses a challenge to this restorative morality by
perceiving history not as sympathetic but antipathetic. Rather than see Mandeville‘s
invocation of antipathies as ―essentialized,‖ I argue that Mandeville becomes Godwin‘s
most explicitly ―post-anarchist‖ figure, an index of what Newman identifies as postanarchism‘s genealogy of historical and social relations that ―unmasks rift behind closure,
discord behind harmony, war behind peace‖ (49). Moreover, Mandeville‘s Heraclitean
antipathy returns to the site of Godwin‘s prior necessitarianism in Political Justice, only
now as the dark ground of a perfectibility that can no longer be guaranteed but that,
nonetheless, does not culminate in traumatic stasis.
Finally, I investigate the significance of Godwin‘s abrupt conclusion to the novel,
which finds Mandeville disfigured and compared to the slaves of the West Indies. I
theorize this comparison with respect to Deleuze and Guattari‘s concept of
―minorization,‖ which gestures in the direction of a subversive potentiality otherwise
foreclosed by seeing Mandeville as merely pathological and cut off from history.
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Although a minoritarian literature fundamentally gestures to the solitary and unique
element that does not fit within an overall majoritarian structure, Deleuze and Guattari
suggest that through the minority figure ―everything takes on a collective value,‖
involving what Kafka called a collective ―of dissatisfied elements‖ (Deleuze and Guattari
17). Through this collective assemblage, physically marked by a grotesque scar on
Mandeville‘s face, Mandeville enters into a ―becoming-minor‖ whose disfiguring renders
him unrecognizable within the political and prolongs rather than resolves the an-archic
dissensus within history.
6.1 Armed Neutrality
On the surface, Mandeville appears to be a pathological figure entirely cut off from
history. Mandeville also seems furthest from the optimistic anarchism of Political
Justice, and even more radically dissociated from the bonds of sympathy than St. Leon.
Wandering around the isolated and gloomy ancestral mansion of his shut-in uncle,
Mandeville develops a habit of ―endless rumination‖ that leads to paranoid fantasies in
which ―every thing around was engaged in a conspiracy against [him]‖ (Mand. 24, 60).
Mandeville thus frequently refers to a metaphoric barrier, an ―entrenchment,‖ that
separates him from ―creatures wearing the human form‖ (93). Indeed, near the conclusion
of the novel, Mandeville is identified both as a non-being (non ens) and a dismissed case
(hors de cour), existentially and legally void.
At various points in the novel, however, Godwin complicates Mandeville‘s
interiority. Beginning with his birth in 1638 at ―Charlemont, in the north of Ireland,‖
Godwin quickly shifts Mandeville‘s narrative to describe the ways in which his personal
origin is already caught up in a ―singular concurrence of circumstances‖ (14). Rather than
mark his birth or the Irish revolt as the archē of a strictly private history, Mandeville
points out that ―Ireland was a country that had been for ages in a state of disturbance and
violence‖ arising from the conflict between local ―habits of living‖ and ―the policy of
English Administration,‖ extending to Elizabeth‘s weakening of the national military,
James I‘s attempt to ―reclaim the wild Irish‖ through colonization, and Charles I‘s
appointment of the unpopular Thomas Wentworth as Lord Deputy in 1633 (9-10). In
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what will become an analogue for his own mind, Mandeville notes that the ―state of the
Irish mind‖ at the time of his birth is the sedimentation of ―all the individual
circumstances, and all the bitter aggravations that attended each act of oppression‖ (11).
Mandeville gestures to the fact that while the Irish nation maintained an ―external
indication of tranquility and submission,‖ the ―core of their thoughts was dread and
aversion,‖ sentiments that could not be publicly confessed and subsequently, not ―fully
analyze[d]‖ (10).
It is not, therefore, only Mandeville‘s psyche that appears divided at the traumatic
moment of his parents‘ murder; rather, furthering the argument of ―Of History and
Romance‖ that sees history constituted as manifest generality and latent individuality,
Godwin suggests that history itself is fissured into conscious text and unconscious
subtext, the latter of which is not separate from its textual surface but an antagonism at its
very ―core.‖ This repressed core recalls Godwin‘s sense of the an-archic flux subtending
rational consciousness and the paradoxical ―essence‖ of an individual history that evades
general historical analysis. For Mandeville is not separated but rather implicated from the
start in a deep history whose complications make it difficult to locate an anchoring point
capable of organizing history as progressive. Mandeville‘s traumatic experience of the
Irish uprising only partially functions as a primal scene, in the restricted sense of an event
of childhood trauma that would account for the individual‘s future psychosis. Rather than
historicize Mandeville‘s past, a primal scene of this order suggests the existence of an
original term that can be repeated, an event capable of being isolated from the historical
repetitions in which it is formed. However, Mandeville‘s gesture to the ―ages‖ of
violence in British-Irish history that exceed his own past, reflects Godwin‘s earlier sense
of necessity as a chain of concatenating events that extends indefinitely into the past in
Political Justice. There is less an origin in a primal scene than a historical complexity in
which Mandeville is already caught up.
A consequence is that the national, political, psychic, and religious identities
within the novel resist easy mapping. Born of English colonizers on Irish soil, when his
parents are slaughtered by the colonized, Mandeville is saved by an Irish Catholic peasant
woman who temporarily becomes a surrogate mother, but he is then raised in the
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ancestral mansion of a distant relative and an anti-Catholic Protestant minister, rendering
his identity as fragmentary as his memories of the trauma itself. When Mandeville later
attempts to join a royalist insurgency against Cromwell under Penruddock and Wagstaff,
he further discovers that ―the name of Mandeville had never been engaged on either side
of the late calamitous wars, and that, particularly at my early period of life, I should do
more wisely to hold myself neutral‖ (116). Conventionally, such neutrality might imply
impartiality or indecision, a detachment from the political. Mandeville‘s motive for
joining the Royalists is not a belief in the cause of restoring the monarch, but a desire to
clear the ―blemish that had passed over [his] name‖ while a student at Winchester, where
he was mistakenly accused of possessing anti-monarchist cartoons (112). Further,
Mandeville‘s disapprobation of Clifford, who eventually joins the same group of royalists
and unwittingly assumes the position initially promised to Mandeville, is enough to make
the latter abandon the group.
Mandeville‘s brief appearance on the political/world-historical map thus does not
reveal any substantive ideological commitment but rather raises the question of the
shifting and ideological nature of commitment itself in a novel in which allegiances are
constantly being displaced. Even when the earlier antagonisms of the Irish become
―published‖ through the institutional ―medium‖ of Parliament that sees Catholics and
Protestants working together against the British, Godwin emphasizes the obstinate
remainder of a ―deeper discontent‖ between religious factions within the Irish
themselves. This discontent explodes from within as the uprising quickly degenerates into
a ―scene of cruelty and massacre‖ (11, 17). Similarly, Mandeville loses his position of
secretary within the royalist group because his family‘s historical neutrality is based on
Presbyterianism, which is seen as less favourable to the royalist cause than Clifford‘s
Episcopalian background and Papist relations (122). Later in the novel Clifford likewise
shifts his earlier sympathies for the house of Stuart by converting to Catholicism and, to
Mandeville‘s horror, is praised in the mostly Episcopal court of the restored Charles II
(252). As Rajan points out, the political loyalties that drive history within the novel
appear to be generated at random, creating multiple antagonisms that cannot be fixed by
ideological binaries (―The Disfiguration of Enlightenment‖178). As the examples of
Ireland and the royalists suggest, ―stable‖ positions themselves appear internally fissured,
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dividing arbitrarily with shifts in circumstance: ―the purpose of the cavaliers and the
Presbyterians became nominally the same, the restoration of the monarchy in the family
of Stuart. But the nearer they grew to a seeming agreement, the greater was their
fundamental antipathy to each other‖ (Mand. 80-1).
This lack of committed positions from which to fix the ideological boundaries in
the novel further shifts the sense in which Mandeville‘s family name is considered to be
―neutral.‖ Given the artificiality of the ideological maneuvering within the novel,
Mandeville‘s neutrality seems to refer less to impartiality than to what Blanchot calls the
―neuter,‖ which refers to a ―relation always in displacement and in displacement in regard
to itself, displacement also of that which would be without place‖ (The Step Not Beyond
5). Mandeville, in this sense, presupposes a displacement of identities that Caleb
Williams had only acknowledged at its conclusion. As that which cannot be placed, the
neuter does not, like the spectator of ―objective disinterestedness,‖ ―move toward a surer
world, a finer or better justified world where everything would be ordered according to
the clarity of the impartial light of day. He does not discover the admirable language that
speaks honourably for all. What speaks in him is the fact that, in one way or another, he
is no longer himself; he isn‘t anyone anymore.‖ As Bruns points out, contrary to the
either/or, multiple choice of a public sphere with clearly delineated discursive positions,
the neuter designates the more paradoxical space of the neither/nor – ―neither this nor
that, ‗the pure and simple no‘ or difference in itself‖ (22). With the neuter the ―first
person‖ of the subjective ―I‖ situated over against the world of objects dissolves and
becomes an anonymous ―third person,‖ ―myself become no one, my interlocutor turned
alien; it is my no longer being able, where I am, to address myself and the inability of
whoever addresses me to say ‗I‘‖ (Blanchot, Space of Literature 28). This more
vertiginous neutrality becomes palpable after Clifford unexpectedly joins Penruddock‘s
insurgency. Faced with another disruption of his attempt to forge a historical identity
beyond his familial neutrality, Mandeville does not withdraw to the calm position of an
impartial observer, but rather falls into a groundless neutrality that suggests the erasure of
any definite position whatsoever: ―on the narrow line between being and no-being. . . . I
had not an inch of ground to stand on. I looked round; and my head turned giddy; I fell‖
(123).
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Mandeville‘s ―neutrality‖ is thus not reducible to an identity per se but gestures to
the complex nature of an individual‘s history that puts the subject in question. Moreover,
as Blanchot argues, the neuter refers to a distinctively literary enunciation, or in
Godwin‘s terms a romance, that dislocates narrative as the expression of an archaic
subjectivity. Formally, the neuter in Mandeville appears through the frequent intrusion of
a third person perspective in which Godwin‘s ―historical‖ voice appears to displace
Mandeville‘s personal voice, as exemplified in Mandeville‘s detailed descriptions of the
―ages‖ of discontent preceding his birth. Further, while experiencing one of his visionary
recollections of his parents‘ murders, Mandeville says that ―all this . . . came mixed up, to
my recollection, with incidents that I had never seen, but which had not failed to be
circumstantially related to me. It would indeed have been difficult for me to have made a
separation of the two‖ (44).
Mandeville‘s visions are thus not strictly a private matter but connected with
circumstances of which he is not the author, investing the individual with a history of the
neuter that unfolds at the very heart of the first person. In this respect, the intensive focus
of the first-person deprives the reader of distance from a history that institution otherwise
disavows, but does not settle in the personal psyche as a fixed identity. Instead,
Mandeville‘s visionary scenes express what Deleuze and Guattari call a ―delirium‖
through which his unconscious is directly invested with the sociopolitical and the
historical. This delirium sets the whole of history adrift, affecting peoples, races,
climates, what Rimbaud refers as ―bad blood‖ (mauvais sang) and a ―bastard race‖ within
history (Anti-Oedipus 84-9). According to Deleuze and Guattari, such delirium is not, as
Freudian psychoanalysis might argue for instance, centered on our personal Oedipal
triangle, but has the potential to invoke the faceless of history, an impure or ―bastard‖
race that resists general history.
At the same time, Mandeville‘s ―neutrality‖ is not not a private matter either; that
is to say, this neutrality does not suggest a simple eradication of identity for history, since
this neutrality paradoxically is Mandeville‘s identity, such that even those events of the
Irish massacre that Mandeville did not experience directly nonetheless remain
―circumstantially‖ related to him. Thus, while the neuter renders the location of the
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subject untenable, it also gestures towards a more an-archic sense of subjectivity that, at
the very moment it can no longer relate to itself as a rationally autonomous being or to
others, appears in its irreducible singularity. The neuter renders the subject nothing other
than its own impossibility, ―subject‖ being the very name for the paradoxical non-place,
the very non-relationship or non-coincidence to itself, which Nancy identifies with an
―existence deprived of essence and delivered to this inessentiality‖ (Experience of
Freedom 81). This ―neutral‖ subject cannot be fixed according to standard political or
moral oppositions, and is only ―posited‖ negatively as a resistance to the hegemonic
processes legitimized by general history. In Blanchot‘s terms, neutrality can only be
discerned in terms of a ―great refusal‖ (le grand refus), an aversion or turning away from
any rational discourse that privileges harmonic integration or redemptive closure, and
sees instead ―the return of the refuted, that which erupts anarchically, capriciously, and
irregularly each time‖ (Writing of the Disaster 76; emphasis mine).
This an-archic refusal implicitly raises the question of the value of the history
from which Mandeville is excluded. In the third volume of the novel Mandeville resolves
to become ―acquainted with the history of the world,‖ reading of Greek and Roman
statesmen such as Themistocles and Aristeides, Socrates and Plato, and the Roman
generals Fabricius, Scipio, Cato and Brutus (215). Though Mandeville fleetingly ―glowed
with exalted sympathy‖ towards the ―glorious world‖ depicted by history, he ultimately
concludes that he can form ―no part of it‖ (215). However, the history from which
Mandeville sees himself excluded is also described as ―for the interest of the general,‖
recalling Godwin‘s idea of ―general history‖ as an institutionalized record of the past
―excellence . . . of sages, of patriots, and poets, as we find exhibited at the period of their
maturity‖ (Mandeville 216; ―HR‖ 456). In particular, Mandeville distinguishes himself
from the general history of the institutional exemplars philosophically grounded in the
Platonic conception of the Statesman as the ―shepherd of men‖ whose definition, as
Deleuze points out, ―literally fits only the archaic god‖ that establishes a transcendent
norm by which to judge good and bad imitations of the model (Logic of Sense 255;
translation modified, emphasis mine). If the ―true statesman‖ is the ―well-grounded
claimant‖ within general history, Mandeville‘s inability to recognize himself within this
history and his designation as non ens sees him closer to simulacra, those false claimants
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who participate least in the eminent model of the Good and thus participate least in
―history.‖
As I discuss in more detail later on, it is Clifford, an almost divine figure
seemingly capable of shepherding individuals and judging good and bad imitations of a
model, who appears as the historically well-grounded claimant. For Godwin, however,
the general history of the well-grounded claimant is not historical enough, in that it
reduces singularity to the form of the general. Consequently, it behooves the reader to
question whether the ―history‖ from which Mandeville is excluded, and excludes himself,
is precisely a history which he ought to resist, namely a general or institutional form of
history that would otherwise remain unquestioned. Insofar as the neuter is a paradoxical
―indifference‖ to traditional moral distinctions, it opens towards the potentiality of a
nonproprietary, ―inhuman,‖ perspective that subsequently opens the possibility of reading
history otherwise.
In order to discern how Mandeville can function as an anarchic figure in this
respect, one can turn to the ways in which Godwin explicitly distinguishes Charles from
more ―institutional‖ figures within the novel: Audley and Hilkiah. Both of these
characters can be constructed within a genealogy of morals as institutional-historical
―types‖ from which Mandeville diverges.
6.2 Individual History as Institutional Typology: Audley,
Hilkiah
After narrowly escaping the massacre in Ireland, Mandeville is remanded to the custody
of Audley and Hilkiah, and subsequently relocated to an isolated ancestral estate. As the
reader shortly discovers, this ―striking scene of desolation‖ is an external projection of
Audley‘s self-institutionalization after a failed adolescent romance with his lowborn
cousin, Amelia Montfort. The romance is prohibited by Audley‘s father (Charles‘
grandfather), a Commodore and ―naval adventurer‖ whose hyper-masculine disposition
and contempt for ―knowledge and refinement‖ renders him both physically and mentally
opposed to Audley. ―A son as would be most unwelcome to his father,‖ Audley suffers
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from a physical deformity that renders him both ―scarcely equal to the most ordinary
corporeal exertions,‖ and ―unequal to contention . . . sinking, as without power of
resistance under any thing that presented itself in the form of hostility‖ (25). Audley‘s
attempt to marry Amelia is doomed from the outset, culminating in a subterfuge that
leads Amelia to marry another and Audley to complete psychic breakdown: ―He
remained a statue of despair. . . . In this one event he had lost everything . . . now all
things were the same to him. . . . He was the shadow of a man only‖ (39-40).
Audley‘s breakdown functions as a metaphor for a post-revolutionary/postNapoleonic melancholia92 that reflects Godwin‘s own disappointment in the missed
opportunities and unrealized potentials expressed in Political Justice. In Freudian terms,
Audley‘s unsuccessful resistance to his father culminates in a ―profoundly painful
dejection‖ leading to the ―cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to
love, inhibition of all activity‖ and ―an impoverishment of [the] ego on a grand scale‖
that mirrors the destitution of revolutionary potentiality (On Metapsychology 252, 254).
In this respect, Amelia not only represents a lost love-object, but also a revolutionary
threat to the hereditary institution represented by the dictatorial Commodore. This threat
is symbolized both in her status as a ―degraded branch‖ of the family tree and in her
unique capacity to break through Audley‘s tendency towards inertia: ―she declaimed
earnestly, but sweetly, against the supineness and indolence that she saw growing upon
him; she told him, that now was the age at which he ought to shore mind with
observations, and make trial of that activity which talents like his required‖ (75). Amelia
serves as the catalyst for a revolutionary possibility within Audley‘s individual history
that is eventually thwarted. The subterfuge by which the Commodore arranges Amelia‘s
marriage to Lieutenant Thomson during Audley‘s rare excursion to London suggests the
capacity for this revolutionary potential to work at cross-purposes: while the event of
revolution suggests a de-stabilization of prior institutions, allowing Audley to temporarily
92
Pfau (2006) reconstructs the Romantic period in terms of a tripartite chronology of ―moods,‖ beginning
with ―paranoia‖ in the 1790s, passing through a period of ―trauma‖ from 1800-1815, and culminating in the
―melancholy‖ of the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic era from 1815-1840. Mandeville‘s publication in
1817 suggests that it can be classified as a ―melancholic‖ text, although one situated close enough to the
traumatic mood of the previous era to register its effects.
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abjure the ―prison-life under his father‘s roof,‖ it does not protect against the emergence
of new institutions or the persistence of old institutions in new forms (32). Further,
Audley‘s physical description as being born ―too soon‖ echoes Godwin‘s earlier caution
with respect to revolutionary ideas in Political Justice. Such ideas, Godwin argues, have
to be strategically announced in order to prevent their misuse or misinterpretation within
a public sphere given to a ―fallacious uniformity of opinion‖ (2:465).
Godwin presents Audley‘s exhausted resignation not merely as symptomatic of
institutions but as institutional in itself, further exemplifying the ways in which his
affective dissent from the archē of the Father can become rigidified. Melancholia
signifies a kind of resistance to institution through ascetic withdrawal. However, in
Audley‘s case, it becomes an alternative form of institution through a mortification of
life, which in turn serves as a bulwark against both historical and existential flux.93 As
Mandeville observes, Audley ―loves his sadness, for it had become a part of himself,‖
suggesting that his internalization of personal trauma does not have an unsettling effect
but rather emphasizes stasis: ―The course of Audley‘s life had been uniform; and this had
infused into him a sort of vis inertiae, a disposition opposite to that of ‗such as are given
to change‘. . . . In reality he rather vegetated than lived‖ (40-1, 32).
In the wake of losing both Amelia and the potential for individual history that she
represents nothing is left but a ―blank,‖ an existence entirely bereft of meaning and
purpose: ―the whole world would be a blank to him, where [Amelia] was not present‖
(75). This ―blank‖ exemplifies what Nietzsche identifies with a pessimism in which ―life
has grown silent‖ so that ―nothing will grow or prosper any longer‖ (Genealogy of
Morals 3.26). As Deleuze points out, Nietzsche‘s diagnosis of this pessimism is
93
Rajan (2002) reflects on a similar problem in a discussion of melancholy in relation to Mary Shelley‘s
Mathilda. Here Rajan takes up Kristeva‘s distinction between melancholic withdrawal and abjection as
―survival, whether the expulsion of the other or the abjection oneself as other‖ (230). On the one hand,
melancholy is characterized by a ―letting-go of life‖ that, while introjecting and thus refusing to mourn its
trauma and re-integrate itself into the social or historical, nevertheless ―withdraws from the activity of
abjection,‖ thereby protecting itself ―from any . . . aggression against the other or self-destruction.‖ If
melancholy becomes ―nonviolent‖ it loses its ―lifeline to eros‖ or desire (230). This ―protective‖ model of
melancholy severed from eros, what Kristeva identifies as depressive ―de-eroticization‖ in which the
subject commits suicide ―without the anguish of disintegration‖ applies to Audley, while Mandeville‘s
persistent aggression comes closer to abjection. See also Rajan (1994).
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connected with a specific moment in the genealogy of morals, namely, the moment after
the collapse of the Enlightenment ideals of ―progress, happiness for all and the good of
the community; the God-man, the moral man, the truthful man, and the social man.‖
Genealogically, Audley‘s vis inertiae expresses an advanced stage of European nihilism
in which ―man‖ finally prefers ―not to will, to fade away passively, rather than be
animated by a will which goes beyond [itself]‖: ―if possible, will and desire are abolished
altogether; all that produces affects and ‗blood‘ is avoided; no love, no hate; indifference;
no revenge . . . in short, absence of suffering - sufferers and those profoundly depressed
will count this as the supreme good‖ (Deleuze, Nietzsche 151-2; Genealogy of Morals
3.17). The philosophical type corresponding to this exhaustion is Schopenhauer‘s ascetic
who, after extraordinary personal suffering, ―retire[s] into himself‖ to attain a point of
absolute self-denial that would finally raise him ―above all suffering, as if purified and
sanctified by it, in an inviolable peace‖ (World as Will and Representation 392-3). The
ascetic type is the extremity of a nihilistic instinct that wishes to diminish the flux of the
historical for institutional(ized) stasis. Audley represents the way in which even a purely
individual history ultimately becomes a form of institution.
Mandeville himself points to certain similarities with Audley: ―in the gravity of
our dispositions we considerably resembled each other‖ (53). Like Audley, Mandeville
finds his only possibility of social and human connection through a female relative
derailed and is preternaturally favourable to misanthropic solitude. Thus, upon arriving at
his uncle‘s ancestral mansion, Mandeville observes the ―desolateness of the scene, the
wideness of its extent, and even the monotonous uniformity of its character‖ as
―favourable to meditation and endless reverie,‖ complementing his ―habitually visionary‖
tendencies (24-5, 60). However, Mandeville points out that his external resemblance to
Audley belies a more important difference: ―there was a difference between me and my
Uncle. . . . [H]e desired no novelty, or none of an extrinsic sort, and shrunk from all
disturbance . . . not such was the condition of my existence. I hoped for, and I dreamed
of, pleasures yet untasted‖ (53). Contrary to Audley‘s desire for immutable stasis through
the extinction of the will, Mandeville remains open to the contingency of the encounter
that, as Godwin writes in ―Of History and Romance,‖ would ―disturb by exciting . . . the
torpid tranquility of [the] soul‖ (454).
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Consequently, the ―monotonous uniformity‖ of Mandeville House takes on a
different significance whether it is approached from the perspective of Mandeville or of
Audley. On the one hand, the desolation of the environment is a projection of the stasis of
Audley‘s melancholia and emanates from a perspective of resignation; on the other hand,
this same environment for Mandeville provides the occasion and ―source . . . of many
cherished and darling sensations,‖ whose intensity accompany his ―meditation and
endless reverie‖: ―there was I know not what in the sight of a bare and sullen heath, that
afforded me a much more cherished pleasure, than I could ever find in the view of the
most exuberant fertility‖ (24-5, 44). This confusion of the landscape with Mandeville‘s
traumatic memories manifests itself as a violence of the sensible, a felt difference that
gestures to a past that pervades the sensible and lives on in the present.
The difference between Mandeville and Audley is reinforced in the ways they
react to their respective traumas and the type of historical memory this reaction signifies.
Initially, Mandeville‘s consideration of his sensations as ―cherished and darling‖ seems
curious, since the bleakness and ―corruption‖ of the natural environment induces a
repetition of the traumatic memory of his parents‘ death:
the scenes which immediately preceded my quitting the shores of Ireland, lived in
my mind. I thought of them by day; I dreamed of them by night. No doubt, the
silence for the most part pervaded my present residence, contributed to this. All
was monotonous, and composed, and eventless here, all that I remembered there,
had been tumultuous, and tragic, and distracting, and wild. I saw in my dreams –
but indeed my days, particularly that part of them which was passed in wandering
alone upon the heath, were occupied to a greater degree in visionary scenes – I
saw, I say, in my dreams, whether by night or by day, a perpetual succession of
flight, and pursuit, and anguish, and murder. (44)
Although Mandeville claims that he finds little pleasure in the ―richest and most vivid
parterre,‖ the memory of the Irish revolt has an exuberance of its own, an affect and
effect contrasted with the repetition of the same characterized by Audley‘s reaction to his
personal trauma, which renders ―all within him . . . a blank; and he was best pleased, or
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rather less chagrined, when all without him was a blank too‖ (39). The repetition
Mandeville experiences as a collapse of the past into the present is not an internal and
external blanking in which everything is submerged in the same, but is depicted as a
proliferation and omnipresence of memories, an an-archic excess rather than lack of
historical consciousness. The chaotic register of the unconscious at this moment
paradoxically becomes a structuring possibility for an an-archic epistemology of all
experience that refocuses history according to its antagonisms.
Later in the novel, Mandeville counter-intuitively describes this excess as a ―vital
spirit that fed my life and preserved my corporeal frame from putrefying‖ (140). Where
Audley‘s melancholia is informed by an internalization and multiplication of pain that
weakens him to a ―mere shadow,‖ Mandeville bears a more explosive potential that
strongly contrasts with Audley‘s ―unenterprising apathy‖ (64, 43). The an-archic
potential of this ambition is spelled out in Godwin‘s later essay ―On the Rebelliousness of
Man,‖ whose thematic resonance with Mandeville suggests that the essay could be read
as a later reflection on the novel. Godwin begins the essay with the assumption that ―man
is a rational being,‖ but notes that ―our nature, beside this, has another section‖ in which
we resign the scepter of reason . . . and, without authority derived to us from any
system of thinking, even without the scheme of gratifying any vehement and
uncontrollable passion, we are impelled to do, or at least feel ourselves excited to
do, something disordinate and strange. It seems as if we had a spring within us,
that found the perpetual restraint of being wise and sober insupportable. . . . A
thousand absurdities, wild and extravagant vagaries, come into our heads, and we
are only restrained from perpetrating them by the fear, that we may be subjected
to the treatment appropriated to the insane, or may perhaps be made amenable to
the criminal laws of our country. (94)
In line with the principles first put forward in Political Justice, Godwin sees that this
rebellious impulse must be restrained through the rational exercise of ―laws of morality‖
rather than institutions. Such laws consist of those ―inexorable rules‖ of convention
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through which ―I am rendered familiar with my fellow-creatures, or with society at
large.‖
But Godwin‘s concern in the essay is less to discover the means of controlling this
rebelliousness so much as to reflect on ―why the bare thought‖ of the desire to do
something ―disordinate and strange‖ takes ―momentary hold of the mind‖ (97).
Significantly, Godwin conceives of this an-archical aspect of human existence as
operating ―even without the scheme‖ of the passions, suggesting that rebelliousness is not
limited to individual psychology but may be considered ontological, something endemic
to human existence as such. As Godwin writes, ―there is a black drop of blood in the
heart of every man, in which is contained the fomes peccati,‖ a tinder-box of sin
canonically associated with concupiscence, but principally defined as that which inhibits
perfection in mortal existence (100). Rebelliousness is not an external intrusion to the
―harmonious‖ constitution of subjectivity and society expressed in classical anarchism,
but is existentially constitutive of human nature. Godwin conceives of the fomes peccati
as the volatile potentiality of a will that both turns away from representation while
simultaneously harbouring the capacity to break through the ordered surface of reality at
unexpected moments.
Though focusing on its pathological manifestations, Godwin obliquely suggests
that rebelliousness might also be an opening towards the ―new‖ by estranging the
individual from general historical norms. Godwin identifies three principles that can be
said to account for rebelliousness that imply some kind of potential for derailing the
normal: the ―love of novelty,‖ the ―love of enterprise and adventure,‖ and the ―love of
power,‖ or the impulse that ―instigates a child to destroy his playthings‖ (97-8).
Rebelliousness seems to imply a potential for de-familiarization and distinction that
accords with Mandeville‘s ambitiousness. Likewise, Godwin‘s description of
rebelliousness strikingly anticipates the Freudian uncanny (Unheimliche) as something
paradoxically both foreign and familiar (―The Uncanny‖ 241). For Godwin suggests that
one of the main causes that gives birth to the ―feeling of discontent‖ that characterizes
rebelliousness is a ―not being at home,‖ where home is defined as ―the place where a man
is principally at his ease‖: ―No unwelcome guest can intrude; no harsh sounds can disturb
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his contemplations; he is the master‖ (Thoughts on Man 102). Insofar as Godwin sees this
loss of mastery as a section of our nature, no such mastery is possible without radically
de-naturing humanity itself. Rebelliousness implies an immanent loss of mastery in the
home of the self, an unsettling of the domestic already evident in both Caleb Williams
and St. Leon. Mandeville appears to be a direct literary manifestation of this ―not being at
home‖ with oneself: his ―soul was chaos,‖ incapable of being domesticated in the manner
of Audley, Hilkiah, or as I will discuss in more detail later on, Clifford and Henrietta
(Mand. 311).
If Audley represents a thwarted revolutionary potential that has now withdrawn,
Mandeville‘s tutor Hilkiah represents an element of ―Sandemanianism‖ that Godwin had
rejected in his revisions to Political Justice, an extreme form of Protestantism in which
rational dissent has become institutionally dogmatic. ―Imbued with all the prejudices that
belong to the most strait-laced of the members of his sacred profession,‖ Hilkiah
represents the world to Mandeville through a particularly religious lens of a classical
anarchism that Godwin has already placed in question. Hilkiah‘s social aims are to ―level
all distinctions between the rich and the poor, the young and the old, and to introduce a
practical equality among the individuals of the human race‖ against the Catholic
―idolatry‖ of the Pope‘s ―despotic authority‖ (21, 46, 50). Hilkiah‘s view reflects not only
the austere rationalism of Godwin‘s early works but indicates a more fanatical element
within the wider project of European modernity that marks a convergence of the secular
sciences with Whig notions of progress that, like Caleb in Godwin‘s first novel, draws
upon simplified oppositions between emancipation and oppression, reason and ideology,
slavery and individual rights.
Two related tropes emerge within this quintessentially ―modern‖ discourse: 1) a
rigorous ideal of self-discipline and self-denial, echoed in Mandeville‘s observation that
his tutor ―had all his passions subdued under the control of his understanding,‖ and 2) a
fidelity to a Kantian conception of ―duty‖ towards an abstract law of reason, expressed by
Hilkiah‘s ―imperious mandates of Go there, or Do this‖ (46, 58). As Kant argues in his
Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, the condition of possibility for moral agency
and autonomy is to be found in a formal ―principle of volition,‖ a practical law that must
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be purified of empirical considerations if it is to be considered truly universal (13). Any
action considered moral must therefore be accomplished ―for the sake of the moral law,‖
and duty is defined as that which acts ―from pure respect‖ or out of ―conformity‖ with
this law (Kant 2, 15). Similarly, Hilkiah‘s severity and emphasis on ―humility‖ as ―a
cardinal virtue of a Christian, without which it was impossible to enter into the kingdom
of God,‖ embodies a fanaticized version of a strategy that would legitimize Mandeville as
a modern subject/citizen through an instrumentalized notion of the ―common usefulness
of life,‖ which Mandeville, as Caleb eventually does in the revised version of the earlier
novel, finds ―hard to flesh and blood‖ (55, 58).
Godwin questions this fanatical discourse through Mandeville‘s internal
resistances to Hilkiah: ―I submitted indeed outwardly . . . but I retained the principle of
rebellion entire, shut up in the chamber of my thoughts‖ (59). Despite an emphasis on
practicality, Hilkiah‘s appeal to an ―imperious‖ law of reason appears to Mandeville as
―vague and imprecise,‖ ―wholly unsusceptible of being applied to use‖: ―If I desired to
correct myself in conformity to its admonitions, I knew not where to begin. I understood
that it was querulous and severe, but that was all. It inspired into me painful emotions;
but if furnished me with no light to direct my course‖ (56). This follows from the Kantian
understanding of duty as compliance with a universal practical law without empirical
content. As Deleuze points out, this practical law ―does not tell us what we must do . . . it
merely tells us ‗you must!‘‖: such a law cannot be known since ―there is nothing in it to
be known‖ (Kant‟s Critical Philosophy x). The pure practical law to which Hilkiah
appeals takes on the mysterious value of a rational imperative that appears entirely
irrational, since the practical law can only prescribe actions ―under the bare influence of
authority‖ and not according to ―actions chosen by their performers‖ (Mand. 56).
Moreover, the pure practical law of reason becomes ―vague‖ precisely because any
instantiation of it necessarily exposes it to the vicissitudes of history and contingency.
At the same time, Mandeville expresses how Hilkiah‘s conception of duty and
autonomy in fact leads to an abstract leveling that imperils the an-archic potential of
individuality as such. The cardinal virtue of ―humility‖ is proffered under the auspices of
conformist and self-denigrating behaviour that privileges a formal or general equivalence
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of individuals over the singular ―case‖ of an individual‘s history: ―unless we emptied our
hearts of all merit and presumption, and confessed that in ourselves we were entirely
abominable and worthless, we could form no expectation of [God‘s] favour. . . . He
plainly told me, that a person of the most loathsome and offensive appearance might, in
the sight of God, be among the excellent of the earth, and be ranked by omniscience with
his most chosen saints‖ (55). In this sense, while Hilkiah‘s classically anarchistic
perspective exposes and displaces the injustices perpetuated by Catholicism‘s fidelity to
the single authority of the Pope, it nonetheless maintains the space of this authority as
―reason.‖ As Deleuze points out, ―reason appears and persuades us to continue being
docile because it says to us it is you who are given the orders. Reason represents our
slavery and our subjection to something superior which makes us reasonable beings‖
(Nietzsche 92).
With Hilkiah the excessive and ambiguous rebelliousness that distinguishes
Mandeville from Audley is thus understood as ―pride and self-conceit‖ (55). Hilkiah‘s
lessons on humility appear naturally averse to what Mandeville perceives as his ―inborn
pride of soul,‖ ―which, like an insurmountable barrier, seemed to cut me off for ever from
every thing mean, despicable and little‖ (101). Mandeville thus perceives his forced
domestic labour under Hilkiah less in terms of humility than humiliation, a desire to
eliminate the conditions by which one could distinguish oneself from the common. This
pride of soul expresses a distinctive crossing of a potential that is at once inhibiting and
differentiating, an obliquity that resists positing within the leveling framework of modern
rationality. Unlike traditional notions of the rational soul as a static ―essence,‖
Mandeville compares his inborn pride with ―the eternal descent of the waters in a
foaming cataract,‖ composed of ―convulsions and earthquakes,‖ the rebelliousness of a
soul ―not at home‖ with itself and off its ―centre‖: ―I was, in some inexplicable way, a
captive . . . robbed of that mysterious and inestimable freedom in which [my spirit] could
feel at home, at its ease, and resting, so to express it, upon its proper centre‖ (68).
This indwelling de-centering potential persists out of a ―neutral‖ feeling of individuality
otherwise foreclosed in Hilkiah‘s image of a society that replaces the archaic ―despotism‖
of the Catholic Pope with the equally problematic, ―censorious and cynical,‖ idea of
rational virtue: ―When Mr. Bradford . . . issued his imperious mandates of Go there, or
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Do this . . . I felt convinced that I was repeated in an manner unbecoming and unjust; and,
my neck never having been bowed to the condition of a slave, my whole soul revolted at
the usurpation‖ (58-9).
Mandeville‘s ―soul‖ is thus conceived as the index of a singularity, a ―peculium .
. . of which no creature that lived was a partaker‖: ―I did not find myself one of a tribe,
whose feelings were common with each other, and who might have afforded me the
example of a cheerful or a careless submission; I dwelt in a monarchy of which I was the
single subject‖ (55, 62). Dwelling in the monarchy of a single subject, Mandeville
expresses something of Political Justice‘s aversion to the public sphere and Godwin‘s
preference for the private exercise of judgment, in that peculium etymologically refers to
that which is ―of one‘s own.‖ However, Mandeville‘s ―neutrality‖ suggests that this
privacy is no longer defined in terms of the rational freedom of deliberative judgment,
but as something closer to what Blake calls ―energy‖ in The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell, something that emerges ―from impulse: not from rules,‖ an energy Mandeville also
names an ―essential characteristic‖ of his nature (E 43; Mandeville 61). Indeed,
Mandeville contextualizes ―the agitations, the agonies, the bitter repinings‖ of his soul as
the ―satanic rebellions of [his] soul against the God that made [him],‖ obliquely drawing
a comparison to Milton‘s Satan and thus bringing him closer to Blake, who deploys the
same figure in The Marriage as a being that resists the tyranny of the angelic Good.
Despite certain formal similarities, the peculium of the single-subject monarchy is
not identical with the punctum of the modern individual. The latter operates under the
premise of a rational, autonomous being capable of freely interfacing with other equally
autonomous beings within a transparent social medium. Historically, the peculium refers
to a Roman law by which a master grants his slave a partial, temporary possession of
property or a certain range of goods that could be withdrawn at any time, accentuating the
contingency of the subject of rights claims rather than a guaranteed, abstract
universality.94 Peculium is also etymologically linked to the ―peculiar,‖ the singular or
94
See Patterson (1982), 182-9.
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remarkable. Though Mandeville generally conceives of his peculiarity as cutting him off
from society, it also grants him a negative capability to see the peculiar everywhere, a
―love of novelty‖ that de-familiarizes the everyday: ―Many a stranger arrived at our
postern, who, to the nicety of a critic in language, would have been a stranger no longer.
But it was not so to me. The very butcher who came once a week . . . did not, even by the
unvaried regularity of his approaches, altogether divest himself of the grace of novelty‖
(53). Here the peculium is also connected with a kind of grace, less in the sense of any
directly religious meaning, than with reference to the irruption of something irreducible
to rational calculation. As peculium, Mandeville cultivates a ―pathos of distance‖ that, as
Deleuze avers, distinguishes itself both from ―the Kantian principle of universality and
the principle of resemblance so dear to the utilitarians‖ as an an-archic ―difference or
distance in the origin‖ (Nietzsche 2).
Not unlike the shift in perspective by which Mandeville extracts more intense
sensations from the same landscapes that reflect Audley‘s passivity, Mandeville also
draws radically different lessons from Hilkiah‘s pedagogical representations of classical
Greek and Latin literature and the violence depicted in John Foxe‘s Book of Martyrs.
Hilkiah approaches the stories of Ovid and Virgil with a ―clear apprehension of their
grammatical construction‖ and ―the passages in which he most seemed to delight, were
those, in which these poets bore the most resemblance to certain passages of sacred writ‖
(46). Ovid and Virgil are great poets only with respect to their degree of resemblance to
or imitation of the archē of the Bible, and within a purely technical idiom that
emphasizes institutionalized literary convention. Mandeville, to the contrary, receives
different ―sensations‖ from Ovid and Virgil and is ―electrified . . . with their beauties‖
(46).
Like the libidinal spark induced by individual history in ―Of History and
Romance,‖ Mandeville receives an affect or feeling of intensity from literature that
exacerbates rather than sublimates his rebelliousness of soul. For Mandeville the act of
reading is not primarily one of passive reception or moral instruction; rather, literature
produces an enlivening affect of a rebelliousness that has not yet been simplified in the
form of a moral. This affectivity is further exemplified in Mandeville‘s reception of
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Foxe‘s apocalyptic ―Acts and Monuments of the Church,‖ a sixteenth century account of
the Catholic oppression of Protestants and Christian martyrs from the Inquisition to the
Marian Persecution of Calvinist dissenters under Mary I (1555-8). Hilkiah intends Foxe‘s
book to horrify Mandeville with the purpose of creating an anti-Catholic sentiment in
Mandeville as fervent as his own. While Foxe‘s ―representation of all imaginable
cruelties‖ does produce ―a strange confusion and horror in [Mandeville‘s] modes of
thinking,‖ this confusion is doubled with a ―deep conviction that the beings thus treated,
were God‘s peculiar favourites . . . the boast and miracle of our mortal nature‖ (52). As
with Audley, the chief difference between Hilkiah and Mandeville‘s interpretation of the
Book of Martyrs is in the value each respectively places on suffering. Hilkiah values the
suffering depicted by Foxe as part of the corrupt history of Catholicism that a progressive
liberal theology displaces and leaves behind. As such, the suffering of the martyrs is part
of a critique of ideologies that leads towards an Enlightenment that asserts the ―practical
equality‖ of individuals. In short, Hilkiah maintains the idea that historical conflicts are
progressively resolvable while Mandeville, to the contrary, identifies directly with the
suffering of the martyrs themselves. Rather than serving to illustrate ideology, the ―boast
and miracle‖ Mandeville associates with profound suffering bears an unsettling and
strangely liberating potential in its ineluctable, ―raw,‖ presence.
Although Mandeville‘s characterizations of Hilkiah‘s fiery sermonizing and
Audley‘s withdrawn resignation appear as polar opposites, both express a strikingly
similar desire to turn away from the suffering and becoming that shapes individual
history for the respective stases of melancholic resignation and the leveling effect that
approximates classical anarchism. While not without their respective influences on
Mandeville, both Audley and Hilkiah emphasize a certain entropic trajectory that
culminates in ―institutional‖ points of view that also stir in Mandeville a rebelliousness
that resists both the acquiescence of melancholy and an abstract version of rationality that
would reduce ―individual‖ existence to a cog in the machine of civil society.
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6.3 Sympathy, Antipathy, and Eternal War
Though Mandeville eventually comes to view Hilkiah as ―an enemy,‖ neither he nor
Audley evoke the ―bitter and implacable hatred‖ that Mandeville directs at Clifford, with
whom he declares an unspoken vow of ―eternal war‖ (56, 144, 124). When Mandeville
first meets him at Winchester, Clifford outlines his basic philosophy of life in a lengthy
discourse occasionally broken by Mandeville‘s own voice (85-9, 95-6). Among Clifford‘s
popular attributes are his acceptance of poverty as a moral virtue and his unflinching
optimism. Despite being born in ―an iron age, and . . . called on to witness, or to hear of a
multitude of crimes,‖ Clifford insists that ―I will not play the weeping philosopher. What
I cannot alter, I will learn to endure. I have but one life, and that, as far as I can without
injury to others, I will make a happy one‖ (95). Clifford‘s desire to live according to what
Mandeville calls ―a cheerful and careless submission‖ to things as they are appears as a
more sympathetic, liberalized, version of Hilkiah‘s strict Protestant morality. Like
Hilkiah, Clifford emphasizes the subjection of the passions to reason and creates a further
inversion of the value-positing eye that sees the ―rich man‖ as ―the only slave,‖ the ―one
true nobility‖ descending from ―Heaven alone,‖ and the ―truly independent man‖ as one
who ―has the fewest wants. He fears no change of fortune, has no anxieties about the
sufficiency of his income . . . the uncertainty of the elements, or the revolution of
empires‖ (85). In clear contrast to Mandeville‘s chaotic soul, Clifford associates his soul
with ―fair weather‖ and a health that ―maintains the evenness of his spirits through every
stage of his journey. . . . Of this miscellaneous household he is thoroughly master, and
has all his passions under subjection‖ (85-6, 87). In Clifford, Godwin sketches the
general historical image of an autonomous being capable of neutralizing the uncertainties,
anxieties, and ―revolutions‖ that dominate at the level of individual history, exemplifying
a rational soul completely ―at home‖ with itself and thus capable of existing ―as well in a
cabin as in a palace‖: ―his gaiety was never-ceasing and eternal‖ (85, 83).
Clifford‘s Episcopalian rather than Presbyterian background, as well as his Papist
relations, situate him as an ideological via media between Hilkiah‘s stern Protestantism
and traditional Catholicism, following from the Anglican tradition that considers itself
both Reformed and directly descended from the early orthodox churches. Significantly,
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Hilkiah‘s death in the text is almost immediately followed with the introductions of the
more benign figures of Clifford and Henrietta, who also correspond with Mandeville‘s
sense of ―entering on a new epoch‖ (69). In this respect, Clifford does not merely
function as the object of Mandeville‘s personal disapprobation but is situated in the novel
as the emergence of a new historical figure, whose concern with ―happiness‖ displaces
the asceticism of duty.
This figure constitutes a specific element within a genealogy of morals that
Nietzsche identifies with the ―men of the present‖ (Zarathustra 18). For Nietzsche, the
last men supplement the leveling doctrine of asceticism with an ideal of ―sympathetic
affections,‖ whose ―tremendous objective‖ is the obliteration of ―all the sharp edges of
life, well on the way to turning mankind into sand‖ (Daybreak 175). Such objectives
recall Godwin‘s critique of general history as a mass of selfsame particulars that
―crumbles . . . like a lump of sand‖ in reducing the individual to an abstract law of
equivalence that ignores the ―sharp edges‖ at which the individual resists inclusion into
the general (―HR‖ 455). Unlike Hilkiah‘s ascetic and externally imposed law of reason,
Clifford represents a more contemporary model of institution: the liberal-democratic
imperative of sympathy that, as Khalip argues, ―solicits alterity through mutual
recognition or likeness,‖ a recognition that becomes prerequisite for a universal
obligation of social acceptance, ―happiness‖ without stress (99). For Nietzsche, this
imperative ensures that the ―men of the present‖ survive the longest, since their desire for
happiness aims precisely at conserving their own aims as the highest expression of
human culture. Thus, the ―men of the present‖ are also ―the last men,‖ because they can
no longer imagine anything beyond themselves: ―‗We have invented happiness,‘ say the
last men, and they blink‖ (Zarathustra 18).
Mandeville thus perceives Clifford‘s cheerful submission to things as they are as
the institutional positing of a ―stationary creature, as perfect in one generation as in all
that are to succeed‖ (90). Clifford embodies a kind of distortion of Godwin‘s earlier sense
of political justice and an institutionalization of perfectibility as a ―perfection‖ that would
inscribe the end of history. The particular ideological seduction of Clifford, as an
embodiment of Nietzsche‘s last men, is precisely in his claim to be universally accepting:
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―the discourses of Clifford . . . appeared almost divine. He charmed, as it were, our very
souls out of our bodies. It was like what is fabled of Orpheus; mute things seemed to have
ears and you would have expected the very beasts of prey to lay down their savage
natures and obey him. . . . He talked like one inspired‖ (Mand. 89). The prescience of
mystification in Clifford‘s language signals the darker undertone of a ―soft‖ crusade to
procure universal assent precisely through an Orphic suspension of humanity‘s latent
rebelliousness. Thus, Mandeville perceives Clifford‘s eloquent paean to sympathy and
universal happiness as both mystifying and promoting servile behaviour, as Clifford‘s
emphasis on poverty subsequently becomes ―fashion‖ amongst the students at
Winchester, a ―blessed inheritance‖ for those impoverished while those who do possess
wealth seek to carry ―about them a brand of slavery‖ (90).
Through Mandeville‘s eyes, the discourse of happiness espoused by Clifford
reveals itself through conformist behaviour and a pragmatism that ironically suspends the
life of thought that Godwin had previously associated with perfectibility. While
Mandeville superficially agrees with Clifford‘s criticism of wealth as a potentially
corrupting influence, he does not conclude in turn that poverty must be the highest moral
virtue, since this would be merely to reverse positions without affecting the structure of
the opposition itself. Not unlike St. Leon, Mandeville claims that those who would
―engender arts and sciences‖ and ―penetrate into the abysses of his own nature, ought not
to be exposed to unmitigable poverty,‖ since the ―poor man [is] strangely pent up and
fettered in his exertions,‖ caught in a Malthusian nightmare of bare subsistence that
ultimately will ―depress his heart, and corrode his vitals‖ (90). Mandeville deconstructs
this conception of poverty as virtue by noting that if wealth enslaves the individual, then
―poverty [does] the same‖ by rendering the individual unable to do anything other than
―endure‖ (91).
Mandeville thus interprets Clifford‘s influence as similar to that of a
―mountebank‖ and an ―enchanter‖ whose leveling doctrine debauches rather than affirms
―the character of his equals‖ (91). Self-denigration and universal equality contain the
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secret assertion of their contrary, namely, the assertion of the superiority of the moral
values Clifford represents. Not unlike Rousseau‘s ―happy slaves‖95 or Nietzsche‘s last
men, the social ideal represented by Clifford appears in the guise of those whose desire is
to preserve their own comfortable security, and whose ostensible ―benevolence‖
manifests the violence of normalization. Indeed, for Mandeville it is precisely Clifford‘s
―air of benevolence, and all-beaming kindness and affection‖ that constitutes the most
galling aspect of his character (309).
Elsewhere in the novel, however, Mandeville describes the sympathetic in
positive terms, as the ideal space in which like meets like in a field of rational
―communication and common discussion with a sober and healthful mind‖ that ―removes
us to a due distance from the object, which we see falsely and distorted only because we
are too near to it‖ (145). Sympathetic discourse opens the possibility of reflective
distance by which the ―airy nothing‖ that characterizes the an-archic flux of the
imagination gains some form of consistency in being posited as a ―local habitation, and a
name‖ (145). The sympathies thus function in concert with an Enlightenment
hermeneutic by which the obscure or distorted can be translated into the clarity of rational
truth, leading to the formation of a sensus communis in the Kantian sense of a universal
communication by which the subject both knows and feels that his or her experiences are
understandable and shared by others.96 Yet Mandeville ultimately sees the validity of this
sympathetic positing as equally distorting since, if one feels otherwise, one cannot
express this feeling unless it becomes displaced according to accepted social codes that
95
For Rousseau‘s discussion of the ―happy slave,‖ see his ―Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts‖ (1750)
in Basic Political Writings, 3-4.
96
Kant‘s conception of sensus communis is outlined in the Critique of Judgment, specifically with respect
to the transcendental deduction of the universal validity of judgments of taste. For Kant, common sense is
first defined as a ―subjective principle . . . which determines what pleases or displeases, by means of feeling
only and not through concepts, but yet with universal validity‖ (238). Common sense is also the ―effect
arising from the free play of our powers of cognition,‖ or the free movement between the faculties of
imagination and understanding ―so far as they refer to a cognition in general,‖ a mental state that presents
itself with a feeling of a ground common to everyone (217-9). As the determining ground for cognition in
general, common sense admits of universal communicability, not through the concepts of the understanding
– the formal categories through which experience is constituted – but through feeling. But for Kant,
common sense is not reducible to ―pleasure‖ in the estimation of a beautiful object; rather, common sense
as ground is ―antecedent to the pleasure in it‖ and thus it is only under the presupposition of common sense
that this pleasure arises (238-9).
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allow it to be read by others: ―I can hardly describe to my friend the thing that torments
me, in the wild and exaggerated way in which I view it with closed doors‖ (145). This
reintroduces a radical cleavage between public and private that questions the
Enlightenment conception of the public sphere as a universal space of intersubjective
communication, as well as questioning the morality of sympathies offered by writers such
as Adam Smith. If, as Smith suggests in the opening of his Theory of Moral Sentiments, a
morality of sympathy requires that one identify with the other as the imaginary double of
the self by which we ―conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments . . . and become
in some measure the same person with him,‖ Mandeville perceives an asymmetry
between himself and others that appears insurmountable in its radical
incommunicativeness (Smith 9). Mandeville‘s self cannot be communicated
sympathetically because it is simultaneously a non-self, an anarchic turbulence not at
home with itself, and hence incapable of recognizing its own torments as sympathetically
mirrored in the other: ―perhaps all this proves me to be a monster, not formed with the
feelings of human nature, and unworthy to live. I cannot help it‖ (44).
If a central attribute of Clifford‘s character is his eloquence, Mandeville admits
that he ―cannot put [his] soul into [his] tongue‖ and that an ―openness of heart‖ is a
―violation of [his] nature‖: ―I was not born with the talent of an ancient bard, and could
not pour out in copious and unexhausted streams, the unpremeditated verse. On the
contrary, I was like the lawgiver of the Jews, ‗slow of speech, and of a slow tongue‘‖ (91,
248, 243). Through Mandeville, Godwin suggests that sympathetic openness can actually
be a form of violation, a paradoxical demand to ―freely‖ express oneself that is ultimately
coercive. This again points to Smith‘s conception of sympathy as imagining oneself ―as it
were into [the] body‖ of another in order to feel ―something which, although weaker in
degree, is not altogether unlike‖ the other‘s sensations (Smith 9). Indeed, the sympathetic
penetration of another‘s mind unintentionally implies something like an imaginary
intrusion that utilizes the external symptoms of suffering in another to imagine their
effects in its own fashion. As David Marshall notes, such intrusion renders it difficult to
discern whether the possibility of sympathizing with another‘s feeling is not simply our
own construction, betraying the impossibility of any completely successful sympathetic
accord (169). In a similar vein, Khalip argues that while ―sympathy supports ethical
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models of intersubjectivity that solicit alterity through mutual recognition or likeness,
while keeping the self intact,‖ it also ―regulates and redeems community through
violence and promotes self-interest through global indifference‖ (99). Clifford‘s
bewitching eloquence repeatedly oversteps the limits of a certain propriety that causes his
sympathetic listeners to become indifferent to the reality of historical antagonisms. As
Clifford says, ―I cannot have a universe made on purpose for me; so I will even make the
best of that upon which fortune has thrown me. Then, hey, boys for a game at foot-ball!‖
(Mand. 95-6).
Paradoxically, it is Mandeville‘s inability to ―posit‖ himself within discourse,
rather than Clifford‘s overbearing readiness to speechify at any occasion, that more
radically confronts the vicissitudes of history rather than deferring such vicissitudes ―for
a game at foot-ball.‖ Mandeville‘s silence exemplifies the individual history of the
persona non grata whose traces are obscured but never completely effaced within general
history. Mandeville‘s only entrance into history will be through the traces of his
disappearance, as in the false rumours surrounding his disaffection from the Royalist
insurgency. These traces mark the obstinacy of a history that refuses positing within
progressivist and sympathetic ideologies and, through romance, have the effect of
exposing its immanent and irresolvable antagonisms by virtue of the very ―falsity‖ of
Mandeville‘s (non)historical existence as non ens. But unlike the more hopeful, if
skeptical, conception of romance in ―Of History and Romance‖ and St. Leon, Mandeville
suggests a different, more traumatic and nightmarish, vision of the romantic.
Mandeville expresses the irresolvable nature of such antagonisms in his scorn
towards ―vindication‖ of any kind: ―most of all, I thought scorn of the idea of vindicating
myself, of making appeal, as to the scales of a balance. . . . Slowly to win one‘s way by
special pleading into the good opinion of those who regarded one with aversion, was, I
deemed, the basest of all degradations‖ (138). The so-called balance of sympathies is for
Mandeville always radically unbalanced, involving the supplication of one party to regain
the good opinion of the other, which nearly always entails the coercion by which a
minority is reabsorbed within the majority from which it departs. Moreover, any
successful instance of sympathetic benevolence is at best a simulacrum: any achieved
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balance can only be an external effect that functions as the displaced sign of a deeper,
irreconcilable aversion. Mandeville thus invokes the pertinent question of why one ought
to reconcile oneself to the majority simply because it is the majority, a reconciliation that
can only ever be the simulacrum of a failed encounter between unequal parties. This
becomes especially visible in the proposed marriage between Clifford and Henrietta,
which symbolizes an ostensible end to the antagonisms and ―rebelliousness‖ within the
text, promising a utopian future in which ―every day would be peace, every day would be
happiness‖ (294). As Godwin suggests through Mandeville‘s frenzied hallucination of
Clifford and Henrietta as the ―Duke of Savoy and his Queen,‖ the marriage not only
suggests a leveling out of the animosities within the text, but also the resolution of
historical dissention. Clifford and Henrietta‘s marriage is seen as the ―boast of the present
age,‖ marking an ostensible conclusion of the antagonisms of the past through their
overcoming in the present via Restoration (298).
However, it is the same sympathetic and Restorative model that will
institutionalize Mandeville for being ―under the dominion of a deplorable malady‖ and as
―one who could never become useful to society,‖ but for this very reason is to ―be treated
with the most exemplary tenderness, while [his] prejudices and [his] groundless fancies
were on no account to become a law, to the sane and effective members of the
community of mankind‖ (298). Mandeville is to be sympathized with only on the
condition of his abjection, exposing how the ideology of universal acceptance in fact
contains a radical form of exclusion, namely, an exclusion of excessive fomes pecatti, the
rebelliousness of and within the individual that would resist the last man‘s search for
green pasture happiness. Though Mandeville yearns to become a figure within a worldhistory whose normative values for acceptance are reflected in Clifford, the ―root‖ of his
aversion is not personal ―envy‖ but ―a sort of moral disapprobation‖: ―I felt like one of
those animals that are said to derive from nature a moral antipathy to some other species‖
(83, 141).
As Mandeville remarks, such aversion goes deeper than the personal, for if there
exist ―sympathies and analogies drawing and attracting each to each fitting them to be
respectively sources of mutual happiness, so, [he] was firmly persuaded, there are
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antipathies, and properties interchangeably irreconcilable and destructive to each other,
that fit one human being to be the source of another‘s misery. Beyond doubt [he] had
found this true opposition and inter-destructiveness with Clifford‖ (141). Despite its
apparent insouciance, sympathetic morality sees any instinct that is not sympathetic as
unnatural and pathological, abjecting the antipathetic for the sake of grounding the
institution of the normal, the common, and the good. To the contrary, Mandeville insists
that antipathies may be equally ―natural‖ and ―lawful‖ as sympathies, reasserting the
insistence of a rebellious darkness at the heart of existence. But asserting the right of the
antipathy to exist does not imply an equalization that could lead to the reconciliation of
opposites, since any such resolution would appear strictly to be on the side of the
sympathetic. Rather, the consequence of rendering antipathies existences in their own
right is to reaffirm a fundamental asymmetry or irresolvable conflict. It is to declare
eternal war: ―an eternal decree had been made between Clifford and me, I was deeply
convinced that his bare existence was essentially the bane of mine‖ (140-1).
Mandeville‘s assertion of the antipathy between antipathy and sympathy clarifies
Clifford‘s earlier refusal to play the ―weeping philosopher‖ (95). As Pamela Clemit
points out, the ―weeping philosopher‖ is a reference to Heraclitus, specifically as
represented in Diogenes‘ Lives of the Philosophers and Juvenal‘s satires. According to
Diogenes, whose Lives Godwin also quotes on Plato in the novel, the legend of
Heraclitus‘ ―misanthropy‖ originates from his refusal to make laws for the Ephesians
―because the city was already immersed in a thoroughly bad constitution‖ and his
preference for playing dice and ―walking about the mountains‖ over dealing in public
affairs (Lives 376). Indeed, Mandeville expresses a similar distaste for the public sphere
that extends to the human species itself (235). The comparison between Heraclitus and
Mandeville can be fruitfully extended farther than Mandeville‘s obvious disapprobation
of the public sphere, however. Mandeville‘s description of himself as ―restless . . . and
dark of soul‖ recalls Heraclitus‘ reputation in antiquity as an obscure and dark
philosopher for his cryptic aphorisms and his assertion of the flux of eternal becoming
(―fire‖) as the mutually terrifying and uncanny logos of all things: ―We both step and do
not step in the same rivers. We are and are not‖ (Mand. 173; Heraclitus Frag. 20). This
logos is not the logos of ―presence,‖ however, since it clearly violates the metaphysical
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archē of non-contradiction, instead emphasizing how what one ordinarily identifies as
static qualities of things are inextricably linked in a relation of unceasing contest, and
whose ―history‖ is defined as the violent succession in which one force periodically gets
the better of the other.
Following from this idea is the notion that strife (polemos) is the universal
expression of logos: ―It should be understood that war is the common condition, that
strife is justice, and that all things come to pass through the compulsion of strife‖ (Frag.
80). At several points in the text, Mandeville expresses a similar conception of war as the
common inheritance of history, relating that he has ―hardly a notion of any more than two
species of creatures on the earth . . . the one, the law of whose being it was to devour,
while it was the unfortunate destiny of the other to be mangled and torn to pieces by him‖
(44).97 Moreover, Mandeville associates his turbulence of soul not only with a Blakean
―energy‖ but also with ―that fire which seemed to be in me the first principle of existence,
and which, though raked up, and hidden with ashes, could never, I thought, be utterly
extinguished, while one pulse continued to beat within me‖ (247).
By defining strife in terms of ―justice,‖ Heraclitus distinguishes eternal war from
a simple lack of order. As Nietzsche points out, Heraclitean strife is justified to the extent
that the philosopher who properly beholds ―this eternal wave-surging and rhythm of
things‖ sees precisely ―lawfulness, infallible certainty, every equal path of Justice. . . .
Where injustice sways, there is caprice, disorder, irregularity, contradiction; where
however law and eus‘ daughter, Dike [justice] rule alone, as in this world, how could
the sphere of guilt, of expiation, of judgment, and as it were the place of execution of all
condemned ones be there?‖ (Philosophy in the Tragic Age 5). Strife is justified to the
extent that it fundamentally denies the existence of any other world than that of
becoming, the flux of an ineluctable ―justice‖ that recuperates Godwin‘s necessitarianism
97
Godwin here could also be said to be invoking Hobbes‘ state of nature, but he also anticipates
Schopenhauer‘s well-known aphorism that uses the image of fish devouring one another to argue for
suffering as the overwhelming law of existing things. However, as the case of Mandeville‘s difference from
Audley clearly shows, the consequences Mandeville draws from the Heraclitean logos is different from the
consequences drawn from the same principles by pessimistic philosophy. As Nietzsche points out, it is
Anaximander, rather than Heraclitus, who can be called the proper precursor to Schopenhauer‘s pessimism
(Philosophy in the Tragic Age 46-7).
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in Political Justice within the more fatal paradox of an absolute indeterminacy that is also
absolutely determined. To acknowledge the existence of a world beyond this flux – that
of permanence, immutability – is for Heraclitus precisely the root of ―disorder‖ in that it
rests on the assumption of something that somehow transcends the vicissitudes of its
necessity, obfuscating the fact that the individual is always part of reality, and that the
antagonism by which the individual strives to overcome the bounds of this necessity is
internal to the logos as such. For Heraclitus, the human is ―necessity down to his last
fiber, and totally ‗unfree,‘ that is if one means by freedom the foolish demand to be able
to change one‘s essentia arbitrarily, like a garment‖ (Nietzsche 63).
Heraclitus‘ false, arbitrary ―freedom‖ is typified in Clifford‘s conversion to
Roman Catholicism and his association with the opportunistic Lord Digby. As Horace
Walpole points out in his Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors (1806), Digby ―wrote
against popery and embraced it; he was a zealous opposer of the court and a sacrifice for
it; was conscientiously converted in the midst of his persecution of Lord Strafford and
most unconscientiously a persecutor of Lord Clarendon. . . . He spoke for the Test Act,
though a Roman Catholic, addicted himself to astrology on the birthday of true
philosophy‖ (Mand. 222; Walpole 2:25).98 Mandeville, however, finds himself unable to
arbitrarily throw off his essentia: ―I cannot bend: I can break; I was the iron man . . . no
compunction, no relenting, no entreaty, no supplication could approach me: I was deaf as
the uproar of conflicting elements, and unmelting as the eternal snows that crown the
summit of Caucasus‖ (123, 184). If Clifford defines himself by deciding to become
blissfully ignorant of the ―iron age‖ in which he is born, Mandeville‘s description of
himself as an ―iron man‖ suggests that he fully embodies the multitude of crimes
disavowed by the last men. Godwin‘s Heraclitean metaphor of Mandeville as both
98
Shifting his allegiance from the royalists to the parliamentarians, Digby became part of the committee for
the impeachment of Lord Strafford in 1641, a royalist who was eventually sentenced to death. He also
spoke out against Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, who was a moderate royalist and advisor to Charles
I. Digby likewise supported the ―Test Acts‖ of 1673, a series of penal laws designed to impose civil
handicaps on Roman Catholics and nonconformists, despite being a Catholic himself. In spite of his
reputation for conveniently switching sides, Samuel Pepys remarks that Digby nonetheless found himself
embraced by the Court: ―the king, who not long ago did say of Bristol that he was a man able in three years
to get himself a fortune in any kingdom in the world and lose all again in three months, do now hug him
and commend his parts everywhere above all the world‖ (4:19).
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―eternal‖ and in ―eternal uproar‖ acknowledges the darker aspects of a freedom that
cannot emancipate itself from its own necessity and, as such, refuses the Enlightenment
figure of a subject that transcends his empirical determinations.
Mandeville embodies the profoundly Heraclitean thought in which total
indeterminacy and total determinacy, flux and necessity, are forever conflated, unsettling
the archē of the universe itself: ―For me the order of the universe was suspended; all that
was most ancient and established in the system of created things was annulled; virtue was
no longer virtue, and vice no longer vice‖ (253). This paradoxical anti-principle of pure
chance and absolute determinacy produces a more tragic perspective on Godwin‘s earlier
conception of necessity. As Percy Shelley perceptively notes in his 1816 ―Remarks on
Mandeville,‖ ―the events of the novel flow like the stream of fate, regular and irresistible,
growing at once darker and swifter in their progress: there is no surprise, no shock: we
are prepared for the worst from the very opening‖ (Literary and Philosophical Criticism
3). Any shock, in this context, presupposes an ordered state and that within this state
certain exceptions can occur, that which Godwin rejects as ―contingency‖ with respect to
reason‘s ―delusive sense of liberty‖ in Thoughts on Man. Rather, the fatality implied by
the Heraclitean logos makes no assumption concerning an order from which such an
exception could stand out. As such, the determination of ―fate‖ becomes equivalent to a
domain of chance that has relinquished any connection to a prior archē: every reality is
necessary, but this necessity is itself, paradoxically, the mark of the fortuitous.
Shelley‘s description of Mandeville likewise follows Godwin‘s ―reductionist‖
approach to the novel. In his preface, Godwin reveals that the original impetus for the
novel was a modified version of ―the story of the Seven Sleepers‖ and ―the Sleeping
Beauty in the Wood‖: ―I supposed a hero who should have this faculty, or this infirmity,
of falling asleep unexpectedly, and should sleep twenty, or thirty, or a hundred years at a
time. . . . I knew that such a canvas would naturally admit a vast variety of figures,
actions and surprises‖ (7). However, the closer Godwin considers this ―vast variety of
figures, actions, and surprises‖ the less palpable its execution appears: ―I should therefore
have had at least a dozen times to set myself to the task of invention, as it were, de novo.
I judged it more prudent . . . to choose a story that should be more strictly one, and should
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so have a greater degree of momentum, tending to carry me forward, after the first
impulse given, by one incessant motion, from the commencement to the conclusion‖ (7).
Godwin‘s original plan would appear to render Mandeville something closer to St.
Leon in its focus on a single romanticized figure traversing a multiplicity of historical
potentialities, or a complication of pathways through the historical. Besides Godwin‘s
pragmatic concerns about such a labyrinthine narrative structure, Godwin‘s decision to
reduce the narrative from a complex course through various historical periods to ―one
incessant motion‖ indicates a passage from St. Leon‘s promise of a distant significance in
history to Mandeville‘s darker premise of a history that no longer holds any promise of
alteration. Nonetheless, as Rosset argues, this an-archic logic does not suggest
institutional stasis so much as the fact that, from the Heraclitean perspective, ―if
everything that exists is essentially the product of chance it follows that what exists
cannot be modified by any intrusion . . . by any ‗event‘ (insofar as no ‗event,‘ in the sense
of something exceptional intervening in the field of chance, could ever occur)‖; that is, if
the real is ―nothing fixed, nothing already constituted or stopped in its development‖ then
―the real is not, in itself, subject to alteration‖ by the external intrusion of ―shocks‖ or
surprises that would disrupt an underlying order (Joyful Cruelty 14-5).
The monotony of Mandeville‘s incessant movement is not contrary to the notion
of flux; rather, it foregrounds the paradox that the world is unable to alter its form
because it is formless, a fatality in which ―everything is always the same therefore means
that everything is always equally fortuitous, ephemeral, and changeable‖ (Rosset 15).
This is to say that, in being identified with the weeping philosopher and the figure of
eternal war, Mandeville manifests the traumatic knowledge that there is no archē to
history. Far from suggesting that this renders reality simply absurd or uninteresting,
however, the absence of archē justifies the universe as an aesthetic rather than moral
phenomenon. As Deleuze points out via Nietzsche, Heraclitus justifies ―existence on the
basis of an instinct of play,‖ the play of chance and necessity, creation and destruction in
the absence of archē (Nietzsche 23). This ―play‖ that keeps the anarchē of the
Heraclitean universe radically open in its indeterminacy and incompleteness rather than
pessimistically closed is implicated in Mandeville‘s refusal to succumb to events that
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would institutionalize him either as a sympathetic or pathological figure, his radical
promise to disrupt any attempt at institutional stasis. Referring to Henrietta and Clifford‘s
marriage plans, Mandeville affirms an unceasing ―rebellious‖ potential: ―I know they
think, the moment I hear of their execrable crime [Henrietta and Clifford‘s marriage] I
shall become transfixed and insensible. . . . They are mistaken. There is a vivifying
principle within me, that they remember not‖; ―from the state of a man, palsied with
astonishment and horror, which was the first effect, I mounted into supernatural energy‖
(311-2, 313).
Mandeville‘s refusal of historical positing through the an-archic identity of
determinacy and indeterminacy maintains a distinctive relationship to historical memory
that further challenges the idea that history can be described according to any archē that
would give it significance in terms of progress or happiness. The collapse of the
opposition between chance and necessity also corresponds to further breakdowns in the
opposition between memory and forgetfulness, past and present, history and romance. As
Rosset points out, just as necessity is no longer defined by a loss of contingency (and vice
versa), ―forgetfulness is characterized not by a loss of memory but rather by an
omnipresence of memories which, at the time of forgetting, flood the mind. . . . There is
forgetfulness not when memories disappear (a situation that never happens) but when all
memories appear indifferently with each one claiming equal rights of recognition‖ (12-3).
Mandeville‘s numerous moments of ―forgetting‖ in the present are similarly
characterized by a deluge of ―detached circumstances‖ from the past that cannot be
discerned clearly and distinctly, causing the past radically to insist itself within the
present.
The ―forgetting‖ of the present does not point to a lack but to an excess of
historical consciousness particularly distinct from the consciousness represented by socalled ―historical‖ figures such as Clifford and Henrietta. Henrietta represents the
possibility of an ―obscure and rural life‖ whose path through the ―vale of existence . . .
leaves no traces behind it‖:
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The being that passes through this tranquil scene knows nothing of kings, and
ministers, and intrigues of a court . . . and is never told of the factions and wars to
the right hand and the left, in which we tear one another to pieces with a thousand
barbarities. He dates his years from no public epoch, the rise and fall of kings, but
marks the lapse of time only by the succession of the seasons. And at length he
sinks into the grave by a gentle decay, without the recollection . . . of one day that
he would wished to have been other than it was. (148-9)
Henrietta‘s ―bewitching‖ portrait is of a life entirely at peace with itself in the dull round
of natural cycles capable of eluding history. Although Mandeville sees Henrietta as his
only chance for a ―normal‖ existence, he comes to recognize that the possibility of life
that she offers is illusory, a temporary attempt to calm a ―sickness‖ that is not merely
personal malady but the an-archic trace of the eternal war that characterizes everything
that is: ―All this was fiction . . . and not adapted to real life. Man is not one of the
different species of animals that we see, that can sleep away life upon a sunny bank. . . .
Man is a creature . . . one of whose most constant characteristics is a sense of uneasiness‖
(149). The soothing melodies Mandeville hears in Henrietta‘s voice are ―the song of the
Sirens,‖ both seductive and potentially ruinous (149). Surprisingly, Mandeville uses the
same formulation to later describe Holloway and Mallison‘s underhanded attempts at
bilking him out of his inheritance, drawing an unlikely parallel between Henrietta‘s
―bewitching‖ sympathies and Mallison‘s unscrupulous venture capitalism as different
dimensions of the same general historical ideology (245).
For Mandeville, the collapsing of the past into the present means not that the past
is not reducible to the present but that it is the irreducible margin of every present: ―in the
margin of every precept were painted the scenes of Kinnard, the murder of my father and
mother and the whole assembly of those among whom they lived, and all the unspeakable
horrors of the Irish massacre‖ (309). Mandeville‘s dual resistance to Clifford and
Henrietta can thus be read less as a resistance to history than the insistence of the
historical through the resistance of an individual history that cannot align itself with
general history: ―They think that the world is theirs; that they walk, crowned with
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garlands, and welcomed with choruses of joy, that they have no enemy to contend with.
By heaven it is not so! I will pursue them forever‖ (311-2).
This refusal is further implicated in the dissensus between Mandeville‘s
individual history and romance, echoing the Heraclitean paradox that the flux of
becoming and of eternal war renders existence an aesthetic phenomenon that repeatedly
questions itself. Mandeville‘s studies of Homer, Dante, and Orlando Furioso are
persistently interrupted by involuntary memories of Penruddock and Clifford, ―without
appearing to require any reference or association from the ideas of the author‖ (22).
Conversely, Mandeville‘s (un)natural antipathy to Clifford is refracted through an
associated series of literary references from Shakespeare and from the Book of Job,
recalling Godwin‘s understanding of association in Political Justice as a paratactical
series of disparate ideas whose connections are largely ―involuntary‖ or non-conscious.
Godwin‘s Biblical reference is perhaps the most telling, since Mandeville will also later
compare his ―condition‖ to ―that spoken of in Job‖ (173). The passage to which Godwin
refers comes from God‘s response to Job from the whirlwind regarding creation,
specifically the description of His creation of the horse in a panorama of other animals:
the wild ass, the wild ox, the ostrich, and birds of prey. As John Hartley points out, in the
Old Testament these animals are associated with the desert and the steppe, ―the habitation
of adverse . . . spirits,‖ ―unruly and demonic to mankind,‖ reflecting something of
Mandeville‘s own sense of existing in a ―moral desert‖ (Job 39:19-25; Hartley 504, 5106; Mand. 125, 131). As G.K. Chesterton explains, the fact that God here radically affirms
the most unruly as an expression of his own infinite wisdom/power gestures in the
direction of an an-archic, Heraclitean conception of the universe, since God unfurls this
―demonic‖ panorama of creatures precisely in order to contradict the ―mechanical and
supercilious comforters of Job‖ who previously attempted to ―justify the universe
avowedly upon the ground that it is a rational and consecutive pattern.‖ To the contrary,
God affirms the reverse: ―God says, in effect, that if there is one fine thing about the
world, as far as men are concerned, it is that it cannot be explained. He insists on the
inexplicableness of everything . . . , the positive and palpable unreason of things‖ (―The
Book of Job‖).
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Both Henrietta and Clifford appear as analogues of Job‘s supercilious comforters,
while Mandeville seems to embody the ―positive and palpable unreason‖ of the universe.
The ―romance‖ of the Book of Job generates an image of the antagonisms of ―real‖
history, as well as the ontological anarchē of existence itself, otherwise disavowed by the
general histories content to describe the deeds of Themistocles and Aristeides, Socrates
and Plato, Fabricius, Scipio, Cato and Brutus (215).
6.4
“An Inferior Race for All Eternity”
In Mandeville, Godwin suggests that confronting the anarchē of history cannot be
measured by its capacity to make itself ―known‖ within general history or through
sympathetic morality. Rather, anarchē remains extrinsic to institutional recognition,
affirming both the palpable inexplicableness of history and the continuance rather than
resolution of eternal war. Godwin‘s violent and abrupt conclusion to the novel is a
forceful expression of this anarche and its resistances to and within the historical. In the
final scene of the novel, Mandeville‘s eternal war finally manifests in a scene of physical
violence. In a last ditch attempt to prevent Clifford from marrying his sister, Mandeville
and a few hired horsemen ambush Clifford and his train during the night. In the ensuing
commotion, Mandeville is accidentally wounded, leading to Godwin‘s abrupt conclusion:
The sight of my left eye is gone; the cheek beneath is severed, with a deep trench
in between. . . . The sword of my enemy had given a perpetual grimace, a sort of
preternatural and unvarying distorted smile, or deadly grin, to my countenance. . .
. Before, to think of Clifford was an act of the mind, and an exercise of the
imagination; he was there but my thoughts went on their destined errand, and
fetched him; now I bore Clifford and his injuries perpetually about with me. Even
as certain tyrannical planters in the West Indies have set a brand with a red-hot
iron upon the negroes they have purchased, to denote that they are irremediably a
property, so Clifford had set his mark upon me, as a token that I was his for ever.
(325)
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No longer an ―act of mind,‖ the connective scar tissue between Clifford, Mandeville, and
the slaves of the West Indies brings the material-historical wound of British colonialism
into proximity with a seemingly insular war between private individuals. Godwin‘s
reference to slavery, while surprising in a novel otherwise entirely localized in the British
Isles, links to specific historical circumstances which render the scar not only a physical
disfiguring but also a figurative tearing open of the novel that places Mandeville
alongside the ―faceless‖ of history.
Not unlike the connection between the earlier Irish uprising and the more
contemporary Act of Union, Godwin‘s reference gestures to the outbreak of slave revolts
in the Barbados (1816-23) that would have been topical in the minds of his readers,
possibly recalling as well the Haitian revolution led by Toussaint L‘Ouverture (17971803), and the best-selling 1789 autobiography of former west-Indian slave Olaudah
Equiano. 99 Mandeville is also published in the frustrated interregnum between the
abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the passing of the Act of Abolition in 1833, a
period of increasing tension in the push towards eventual (legal) emancipation. In one
sense, Mandeville‘s scar can be understood as a means of obtaining redress, insofar as
Clifford‘s wrongs become manifest in the form of a physical disfigurement. This would
allow Mandeville to finally enter into the world of discourse, his wound being evidence
for a tort that would publicly damage Clifford‘s reputation. However, historical
circumstances suggest that reading Mandeville‘s scar as emancipating in a legal context
is not yet a possibility. The more immediate sense to Mandeville‘s ―victory‖ over
Clifford ambiguously consolidates, rather than emancipates, Mandeville‘s role as a slave,
suggesting an inability to put an end to historical antagonisms. Rather than negate
Clifford‘s ―wrong,‖ Godwin‘s metaphor appears to redouble it.
Paradoxically, Mandeville becomes connected to the faceless of history at the
precise moment that he would enter history, creating an oscillation between presence and
absence that can be related to what de Man calls ―disfiguring‖ or ―de-facement.‖ In his
99
See C.L.R. James‘ classic account of the Haitian revolution (1938) and Equiano‘s self-published
Interesting Narrative (1789).
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readings of Shelley and Wordsworth, de Man describes figuration as the element in
language that allows for representation, anchored by the binaries of subject and object
and naturally illustrated through optical or specular icons, the sun-eye as the emblem for
(self)knowledge, expressed through the ―face‖ as the sign or identity of the anthropos
(Rhetoric 75). Citing the 1805 Prelude in which Wordsworth writes of the way his ―mind
hath look‘d / Upon the speaking face of earth and heaven,‖ de Man links the ―speaking
face‖ as the ―necessary condition for the existence of articulated language‖ by which
―man can address and face other men‖ with the act of ―looking‖ by which the mind gazes
upon a speaking face (87-90). According to de Man, Wordsworth‘s connection between
the eye and the face expresses the way in which ―language originates with the ability of
the eye to establish the contour, the borderline, the surface which allows things to exist in
the identity of the kinship of their distinction from other things,‖ a kinship which
ultimately depends on ―a process of totalization‖ by which things are gathered into the
―larger, total entity‖ of the face, ―as the combination of parts which the mind . . . can lay
claim to‖ (91). Figuration is the process of giving ―face‖ or significance to that which is
otherwise ―senseless‖ through the lucidity of a language ―of repose, tranquility, and
serenity,‖ a ―solar language of cognition that makes the unknown accessible to the mind
and the senses‖: ―the otherness of a world that is in fact without order now becomes, for
the eye, a maze made accessible to solar paths‖ (78-80, 110). However, de Man locates
moments in both Wordsworth and Shelley that show this figuration undone ―to the
precise extent that it restores‖ or seeks to restore itself (119). This paradoxical moment of
self-erasure is a disfiguring that begins to unravel a figure of meaning in the same
moment it is posited as a phenomenon, marking a ―loss of face‖ that entails the
disfiguring of the specular, transcendental archē that would guarantee meaning as selfpresence beneath the divergences of meaning by signifiers, signaling an irreducible
incoherence of the random and efficacious processes that gives rise to the phenomenal
effect of meaning.
In the revised finale to Caleb Williams, Godwin dramatizes a metaphorical loss of
face that sees Caleb come to the threshold of a ―responsible anarchy.‖ In Mandeville,
however, defacement is literalized. Mandeville not only loses the sight of his left eye, but
is also given a ―preternatural and unvarying distorted smile‖ across his left cheek by
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Clifford‘s sword (324). Literal defacement brings about a paradoxical ―materialization‖
of the historical traumas within the text. Materiality does not mean a return to the bare
positivity of the brute fact, however, which can always be recuperated within general
history. Rather, the scar bears a materiality in de Man‘s sense of a ―deep, perhaps fatal,
break or discontinuity,‖ that Derrida glosses as ―a very useful generic name for all that
resists appropriation‖ and hence, eludes any promise of closure (de Man Aesthetic
Ideology 79; Derrida, ―Typewriter Ribbon‖ 154). At a meta-textual level, the scarring of
Mandeville the character is simultaneously a defacing of Mandeville the text, which
concludes with the abrupt violence of the wound itself and whose materialization lacks
(self)restoration or redemption in any traditional sense. For Godwin does not reveal the
consequences of Mandeville‘s actions other than as the permanence of a scar that forever
disjoins any final balancing of wrongs. Mandeville‘s scar becomes the material trace of
that which undoes the domestic ―triple knot of unrivalled happiness‖ with Henrietta and
Clifford that would close in on itself through the obscure and rural life, exposing it to the
anarchē of history (294).
If de Man‘s notion of disfiguring refers primarily to rhetorical figures and leaves
aside any historical connection to the slaves of the West Indies, Mandeville‘s defacement
could also be read through Deleuze and Guattari‘s concept of ―minor literature.‖
According to Deleuze and Guattari, a minor literature is primarily composed of three
elements. First, ―minorization‖ arises from a marginalized position within a major
language rather than from ‗minor‘ languages themselves, thus affecting the major
language ―with a high coefficient of deterritorialization‖ (Kafka 16). Throughout
Mandeville Godwin exemplifies this coefficent of deterritorialization in Mandeville‘s
marginal status and his inability to enter into the majority discourse represented through
Clifford, as well as his incapacity to stake out a stable position within the shifty political
landscape of the novel. In another sense, the very perspective of the novel itself can be
called a deterritorialization of Godwin‘s own preferred political standpoint. By focalizing
the novel through a ―pathological‖ royalist such as Mandeville, Godwin forces an
encounter with the political instability of the past and the present from the anterior of his
avowed republican sympathies. In turn, the volatility and extreme antipathetic nature of
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Mandeville‘s character generates a disquieting effect that challenges even the most
sympathetic readers.
The second characteristic of minorization according to Deleuze and Guattari is
that it is thoroughly political. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, the ―cramped space‖ of the
minor ―forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual
concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole
other story is vibrating in it‖ (Kafka 17). The ―whole other story‖ vibrating through
Mandeville is an intensification of the an-archically unsettled historical and political field
in which the novel unfolds, vividly materialized in Mandeville‘s scar, and opening a ―line
of flight‖ that connects the personal to the political. Third, following from the connection
that renders an individual history irreducibly political, minorization engenders a
―collective enunciation‖: ―what each author says individually constitutes a common
action, and what he or she says or does is necessarily political, even if others aren‘t in
agreement‖ (Kafka 17). On the surface, the collective enunciation appears to be difficult
to identify in Mandeville, given that he finds himself unable to enter into sympathetic
communication with anyone. Collective enunciation is not constituted on the sympathetic
communication between ―similars,‖ but on the more paradoxical communication that
only occurs across a radical disjunction, the scar along which the volatile mix of personal
and historical antipathies interact directly with one another rather than through the
intercessor of sympathetic reason. While maintaining a certain skepticism minorization
nonetheless creates what Kafka calls an ―assimilation of dissatisfied elements‖ through
which literature ―produces an active solidarity‖ between individual histories that,
collectively, demonstrate the intolerability of existing institutions (qtd. in Deleuze and
Guattari, Kafka 17). In this respect, Mandeville is not absolutely cut off; rather, his
marginalization in the text as non ens or hors de cour opens the possibility of a collective
enunciation with the slaves of the West Indies as ―dissatisfied elements‖ within worldhistory.
Mandeville is equally not to be understood as a representative of slavery in the
sense that he would function as a subject that speaks ―for‖ a specific social group that has
been repressed. As an an-archic figure of eternal war and irresolution, Mandeville does
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not achieve redress from the social structure from which he is excluded, just as for
Deleuze and Guattari a minority is not defined primarily by a desire to be included by the
majority. While necessary in its own way, the struggle for ―rights‖ is the index of a more
subterranean antagonism that does not base itself on the archē of an identifiable social
group awaiting public recognition. Rather, as Daniel W. Smith points out, the gesture of
minorization is that the ―people‖ are ―constituted on a set of impossibilities in which the
people are always missing, in which the only consciousness is consciousness of violence,
fragmentation, the betrayal of every revolution, the shattered state of the emotions and
drives . . . ; that is, a lived actuality that at the same time testifies to the impossibility of
living in such conditions‖ (xliii).
Godwin‘s conclusion exemplifies precisely this intolerability and impossibility,
which materializes the drama of the entire novel as an anarchistic challenge to the
majority. Insofar as the marriage of Henrietta and Clifford is seen to be the ―boast of the
present age,‖ Mandeville‘s minoritarian status effectively robs the present of the selfsatisfied illusion that ―every day would be peace, every day would be happiness.‖ The
minor figure instead reveals the catastrophes entailed by very illusion that there could be
resolution, the fact that such an idea, no matter how sympathetic or universal, always
involves a certain hegemonic violence. Consequently, Mandeville‘s connection to slavery
opens a point of ―nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third World zones‖ through
which individual history draws a line of escape, not into the eternal stasis of the present,
but a barbed and irregular line in the shape of a scar that resists the liberal, as well as
classically anarchistic, dream of universal harmony and inclusion (Deleuze and Guattari,
Kafka 27).
To briefly conclude, Mandeville can be said to be Godwin‘s most an-archic text.
Although sharing concerns that are pervasive throughout Godwin‘s career, Mandeville
goes furthest in the direction of presenting anarchē not only as a psychological but also
as a historical and even existential (anti-)principle. It brings certain elements of Political
Justice, particularly the conception of necessity and the freedom of the particular to
deviate from the conventions of the present, to their most radical extremity. In turn,
perhaps not entirely consciously, Godwin produces a critique of institution even farther
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reaching than in his previous works. Mandeville includes an intense skepticism towards
the most contemporary and the most accepted modes of institution: the liberal doctrine of
universal inclusion, rational intersubjectivity, and sympathy for the ―other.‖ Through
Mandeville, Godwin engages in a genealogy of morals that places these values in
question, culminating in the distinctive moment of literary anarchism that Blanchot
associates with le grand refus through which another history is glimpsed, the history of
the Other‘s anarchistic NO to things as they are: ―‗We are delivered over to another time
– to time as other, as absence and neutrality; precisely to a time that can no longer redeem
us . . . an unstable perpetuity in which we are arrested and incapable of permanence, a
time neither abiding nor simplicity of the dwelling-place.‘ Time of the exile‖ (Blanchot,
Infinite Conversation 44; Bruns 30).
202
Chapter 7
7
(In)Conclusion: Towards a Theory of Romantic
Anarchism
―Anarchism,‖ writes Woodcock, ―is a creed inspired and ridden by paradox, and thus,
while its advocates theoretically reject tradition, they are nevertheless very much
concerned with the ancestry of their doctrine‖ (Anarchism 35). It is in view of
anarchism‘s inspiration from and encounter with its own paradoxes that it produces
within its own tradition texts that must be concerned, not only with rejecting things as
they are, but also with opening a space that would allow an investigation into anarchism‘s
foundations. The purpose of this study has been to examine, through the philosophical
and literary texts that lay the foundations for anarchism in Godwin, the antagonisms
within these foundations between a more recognized Enlightenment discourse and an
emerging skepticism that unworks the possibility of a purely rational model of politics.
Thus, although the classical discourse of political anarchism that Godwin inaugurates
often remains within the horizon of an orthodox metaphysics, a closer examination of the
tensions generated by Godwin‘s own texts shows a distinctively critical perspective that
anticipates many of the anti-foundationalist arguments of contemporary theorists who
reread anarchism through post-structural theory. Godwin‘s need to express his politics
through literature results in an important reflexive shift that necessitates a corresponding
reflexivity in anarchist politics, a connection not yet sufficiently recognized by Godwin‘s
political and literary interpreters alike.
It is not only the paradoxes that arise within Godwin‘s texts, however, that call for
a reinterpretation of anarchism at its ―origins.‖ If Godwin appears as a privileged point of
entry, it is because of his historical relationship to anarchism and the potential to
reevaluate both the concept of anarchy and the genealogy of the movement itself at its
conceptual beginnings. What concerns me in these final pages is how one might reread
the possibilities of a ―romantic anarchism‖ through the idea of anarchē. In doing so, I
want to stress how a conception of anarchism as anarchē overlaps with broader romantic
concerns with the dilemma of freedom, as well as with romanticism‘s distinctive
203
relationship to a radical ―negativity‖ that might be called an-archic in thinkers such as
Hegel and Schelling. In this manner, one might begin to rethink the way that anarchism
has hitherto been attached to romanticism through a sentimental reading of history as the
fall from the pure immanence and harmony of society located in the past and the need to
recover this society at the far goal of time. Insofar as the idea of anarchē renders such
notions interminably problematic, the conventional relationship between romanticism and
anarchism may also be subject to reconsideration.
Godwin shares a set of conceptual topoi with both Enlightenment and romantic
traditions, British and otherwise, that have also been linked with social, political, and
literary goals that could be called anarchistic. Nonetheless, as these topoi shift in
emphasis from Enlightenment rationality to the romantic ―imagination,‖ such goals have
largely been interpreted within the framework of orthodox notions that see the latter as
fostering nostalgia or longing for a lost pre-capitalist or pre-industrial collectivism. Thus,
Charles Taylor argues that the fundamental principles and goals of anarchism seem to
belong exclusively to ―those thinkers who stand in a romantic or expressionist tradition of
whatever kind‖ (542). Taylor‘s assimilation of anarchism, romanticism, and
expressionism likewise underwrites Malcolm Löwy and Robert Sayre‘s discussion of
romantic anarchism in Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (2001). According to
Löwy and Sayre, one can discern a ―libertarian, anarchist, and anarcho-syndicalist
Romanticism, which takes its inspiration from collective pre-capitalist traditions of
peasants, artisans, and workers qualified to lead a struggle that targets the modern state as
much as it does capitalism per se‖ (80). A contemporary exemplar of this
libertarian/anarchist stream of romanticism can be found in the work of Gustav Landauer
who, in Löwy and Sayre‘s estimation, shares with classical German romanticism ―a deep
nostalgia for medieval Christianity,‖ and a desire to create ―on the basis of a marriage
between modern Zivilisation and premodern Kultur, an authentically new society, without
state or social classes‖ (82). This particularly romantic combination of nostalgia and
hope, according to Richard Sonn, allows one to identify anarchists as ―revolutionaries in
the original sense of the term . . . they wished to ‗revolve‘ back to a more harmonious
society. The anarchist rejection of contemporary society was nearly total; their proposed
alternative fused elements of a remembered past with a vision of a utopian future‖ (3).
204
Those elements of romanticism‘s often explicit anti-modern pathos are, in this respect,
situated almost entirely in terms of what Peter Marshall identifies as the ―mainstream‖
social anarchism occupied by ―mutualists, collectivists, communists, and syndicalists‖
(Demanding the Impossible 6).
One can discern the contours of this conventional version of anarchism among
more overtly political figures of romantic poetry, such as Blake and Percy Shelley.
Critics like Marshall and John Mee have located anarchistic political strains within Blake
as participating in both republican and antinomian traditions of dissent.100 Perhaps the
most direct poetic statement of the futural dimension of this type of romantic anarchism
appears in the concluding lines of Act III in Shelley‘s Prometheus Unbound. Finally
released from (self)torment after Jupiter is overthrown by his own progeny, Prometheus
directs the Spirit of the Hour to announce humanity‘s emancipation from tyranny:
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man
Passionless? — no, yet free from guilt or pain,
Which were, for his will made or suffered them,
Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves,
From chance, and death, and mutability,
The clogs of that which else might oversoar
The loftiest star of unascended heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane. (III.iv.193-204)
100
Despite Blake‘s explicit anti-rationalism and anti-empiricism, Marshall sees certain similarities between
both Blake and Godwin‘s respective criticism of social injustices. See Marshall (1994) and (1992) 97, 151.
For further discussions of the complex network of influences and forces that inform Blake‘s connection to
the popular radical movements in the romantic period, see also Mee (1994) and McCalman (1988).
205
The utopian image of the ―sceptreless man‖ liberated from the chains of necessity clearly
echoes Godwin‘s confidence in the progress of human perfectibility.101 Shelley also
follows Godwin, and anticipates later anarchists such as Proudhon, in opposing his vision
of the sceptreless man to parochial notions of anarchy as mere disorder. Thus, in a work
such as ―The Mask of Anarchy,‖ Shelley sees the classic philosophical and political
signifiers of order in ―God, King, and Law‖ as the true arbiters of social chaos.
This anarchistic politics is not only a feature of certain strains of British
romanticism, but can also be found in post-Kantian notions of ―freedom‖ articulated by
early German idealist philosophers. This approach finds one of its earliest expressions in
the aptly titled ―Oldest System-Program of German Idealism,‖ an anonymous fragment
written in Hegel‘s hand but variously attributed to Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin.102
The ―System-Program‖ outlines a new philosophy of nature, ethics, politics, and
aesthetics. The program of Idealism‘s new politics, in particular, bears a distinctively
anarchistic tendency: ―there does not exist any idea of the state, because the state is
something mechanical; just as there is no idea of a machine. Only that which is [an]
object of freedom is called [an] idea. Hence, we must also move beyond the state! – For
every state must treat free human beings like a mechanical set of wheels; and that it must
not; therefore, it shall cease to exist‖ (―System-Program‖ 154).103 Associating freedom
with the Idea and the state with the ―machine‖ recapitulates a conventional romantic
binary – likewise evident in Blake, Coleridge, and Shelley – that privileges the ―possible‖
or the imaginary over the actual or the empirical.
As the examples of Blake, Shelley, and the ―System Program‖ suggest, several
prominent figures of what comes to be associated with the British and the European
101
For a general discussion of Godwin‘s political influence on Shelley see Cameron (1962), 77-87.
More detailed explorations of the debate concerning the authorship of the ―System-Program‖ can be
found in Krell (2005), 16-45; Pfau (ed., 1988), 182 n1.
103
The anarchistic bent of the new politics may have been suggested by Hölderlin, whose other writings
seem to express the most stridently anti-statist attitude of the possible authors of the fragment. Aside from
having been part of a group of politically active republicans that planted a ―Tree of Freedom‖ in
Tubingen‘s market square, Hölderlin‘s epistolary novel Hyperion specifically identifies the State as ―the
coarse husk around the seed of life, and nothing more. . . . [L]et it not obstruct you, and you will come,
come with your all-conquering ecstasies‖ (23-4).
102
206
romantic tradition gesture towards the possibility of a society without institution, closely
approximating the ends (if not the means) of later nineteenth-century thinkers of
anarchism. Yet, as the complex recursive structure of a novel such as Caleb Williams
suggests, anarchism‘s revolutionary dimension can also be thought as a problematizing
movement that is not simply the desire to recover a lost origin in the future: once Caleb
―returns‖ to the origin of his narrative, joining the two ends of his tale in a circular
movement of revolution, he finds that this origin perhaps never existed in the first place,
or that it had appeared to exist only in its displacement through the ―revolutions‖ that
typify the procedure of the text itself. Caleb Williams is one example of how what is
revolutionary in romantic anarchism may be considered less part of an expressivist or
aestheticist tradition than more closely attuned with what Khalip calls ―an endless
overturning of manifest existence‖ that ―cannot conceptually coincide with something
like an origin‖ (174).
There are further indications in the writings in romantic theory that recognize a
more profoundly an-archic negativity within the very definition of the romantic and the
romantic approach to the complex dilemma of freedom that remains irreducible, even
resistant, to the more explicitly professed desires concerning the idealist marriage of
Zivilization and Kultur. As mentioned in our previous discussion of Godwin‘s ―Of
History and Romance‖ and St. Leon, Schlegel sees the romantic as that which is
fundamentally unfinished, ―still in the state of becoming: that, in fact, is its real essence:
that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected‖ (Schlegel 32). While
approaching the romantic from a radically different perspective, Godwin‘s increasing
skepticism as to the viability of a political justice predicated on rationality more and more
appears to reach a different kind of acknowledgement, one that sees perfectibility as an
interminable process of self-revision precisely because it cannot ground itself in an
―uncontaminated point of departure.‖ At the same time, Schlegel‘s definition of the
romantic, like Godwin‘s, is not characterized by a sentimental longing for a lost origin
that once coincided with itself, but rather is oriented towards a future that remains
unknown, and is therefore receptive to individuality and to the new as potentials capable
of disturbing the values instituted in things as they are.
207
Of the possible authors of the ―System-Program,‖ it is Hegel who appears to
depart most drastically from the fragment‘s subversive, anti-statist politics. Hegel‘s wellknown discussion in his Philosophy of Right (1821) hailed the ―State‖ as an embodiment
of Spirit in the political. Unlike the models of civil society proffered by the Scottish
Enlightenment, Hegel saw the State not as a means of protecting individual rights but as
an ―end in itself‖ through which freedom ―enters into its highest right‖ (§ 258). Yet,
nineteenth-century anarchists such as Bakunin were also profoundly influenced by Hegel,
and appropriated the dialectical thrust of Spirit‘s historical progress towards absolute
knowledge for their own philosophical purposes. As David Weir points out, Bakunin had
studied Hegel for several years and was especially taken with the ideas of the Young
Hegelians, particularly those of Feuerbach. Like the Young Hegelians, Bakunin wanted
to adopt Hegel‘s methodology while moving away from its statist conclusions, investing
the dialectic with a revolutionary force predicated on the Feuerbachian dictum that
―theology must be replaced with anthropology‖ (Weir 27). However, as argued in the
introduction to this work, this adaptation of Hegel towards an anarchistic notion of
―progressive action in history‖ remains theoretically conservative in that it replaces the
archē of God with that of man.
Rather than reduce Hegel to the evolutionary idealism adopted by certain classical
anarchists, theorists such as Adorno, Nancy, and izek – to name only some of the most
prominent – gesture toward the possibility of a different Hegel, one that might be
recognized as more an-archic. Using logic strikingly reminiscent of Godwin‘s critique of
general history, Adorno‘s revision of Hegel in his Negative Dialectics attempts to move
the dialectic away from an ―identitarian‖ model that assimilates the particular under the
universal and assumes the reconciliation between thought and the objects that it claims to
know. The refusal of identitarian thought calls for a dialectics that no longer aims ―to
achieve something positive by means of negation,‖ as in Bakunin‘s post-Blakean view of
anarchism as a revolutionary negation that would realize society‘s immanent, ―natural
laws‖ (Negative Dialectics xix). To the contrary, dialectic becomes ―negative‖ to the
extent that it names ―the consistent sense of non-identity. [Dialectics] does not begin by
taking a standpoint. My thought is driven to it by its own inevitable insufficiency‖
(Adorno 5). Thought‘s insufficiency to itself means that dialectic never arrives at a
208
foundation or a sense of completion, but rather takes on the role of an antagonistic,
dispossessed form of critical reflection that persistently disrupts the positivity of archē.
Similarly, Nancy‘s discussion of the ―restlessness‖ of the negative in Hegel points
to an explicitly an-archic logic. For Nancy, the properly ―Hegelian thought does not
begin with the assurance of a principle. It is simply identical to the restless. . . . The
restlessness of thought first means that everything has already begun: that there will
therefore be no foundation‖ (Hegel 8). In identifying the fundamental restlessness of the
negative, Nancy touches upon something of the paradoxical coincidence of contingency
and necessity that comes to the fore in Godwin‘s turbulent depiction of history in
Mandeville. As Nancy suggests, where the upsurge of the finite in its contingency breaks
the necessitarian ―thread of history,‖ Hegel‘s identification of negativity with the very
becoming of history means that ―this [break] happens of itself, because [history‘s] very
continuity is only division and distension. . . . The finite figure thus presents, each time,
only itself – itself and its infinite restlessness‖ so that ―every beginning . . . is not a
beginning‖ (8).
Finally, arguing against conventional representations of Hegel as the philosopher
of systematic closure and the panlogistic identity of the Concept, izek rereads ―absolute
knowledge‖ as denoting ―a subjective position which finally accepts ‗contradiction‘ as an
internal condition of identity . . . a final consent to the fact that the Concept itself is ‗notall‘‖ (Sublime Object xxix). Absolute knowledge becomes for izek an affirmation of
contingency insofar as it names precisely the paradoxical moment in which the subject
acknowledges a radical loss, the failure of any such attempt at closure. Anarchē might be
understood, in this context, as another means of exemplifying the logic of the ―not-all‖: if
the term archē signifies the metaphysical locus of the one-all, the repose of an originating
―one‖ that grounds and determines the ―all‖ that issues from it, anarchē is by definition
not-all. The not-all, which izek appropriates from Lacan‘s formula of feminine
sexuation, resists a ―masculine‖ logic that posits the withdrawal of an original presence or
a normative law that reason gives to itself as archē. Instead, to use Bruno Bosteels‘ terms,
the not-all suspends the universality of the paternal/masculine signifier and shows how
the consistency of archē can only be achieved by foreclosing ―a key element which
209
paradoxically incompletes the structure by being included out. This structure is not-all:
there is always a gap, a leftover, a remainder. . . . [The social] is . . . constitutively
incomplete, fissured‖ (128).
Post-anarchist thinkers such as Newman have fastened upon izek‘s distinctive
approach to Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to rethink anarchism as anarchē. Without
explicitly using the term, Newman deploys the idea of the not-all to argue that a poststructural return to anarchism can only begin in earnest where the social is reconceived
―as a series of signifiers founded, like the Lacanian subject, on a constitutive lack. . . . [I]t
can never form a closed identity, because there is always a Real that remains
unsymbolizable . . . and thus, remains open to different political signifiers‖ (Newman
147). Absent from Newman‘s appraisal, however, is izek‘s insight into how the logic of
the not-all might also be found in Hegel, which is to say, how this ostensibly poststructuralist theorization of the social‘s incompletion was anticipated within the
philosophical, literary, and historical dilemmas encountered by romantic writers.
The conception of a remainder that an-archically ―incompletes‖ the social is also
at the heart of Schelling‘s middle-period philosophy. Jürgen Habermas‘ suggestive
comment that Schelling‘s middle work, which spans from the 1809 essay on freedom, the
―Stuttgart Seminars‖ of 1810, and the three incomplete drafts of his Ages of the World
(1811, 1813, 1815), contains ―barely concealed anarchistic consequences‖ is yet to be
explored in significant detail by much of the secondary literature, and is completely
absent from contemporary post-anarchist theory (46). The focus of Schelling‘s earlier
philosophy of ―Identity‖ sought to demonstrate ways in which opposed Spinozist and
Fichtean philosophies of nature and freedom constituted two ―sides‖ of the same
Absolute. Yet, in arguing that the purportedly opposed philosophies of absolute
(objective) necessity and absolute (subjective) freedom function as complementary,
Schelling remains idealist in his desire to see this complementarity as arising from an
unconscious identity, a ―pre-established harmony‖ that is neither real nor ideal but their
archē, or ―common source‖ (System of Transcendental Idealism 208). Positing the
Absolute as the hidden source behind exterior manifestations of the disjunction of subject
and object, Schelling proposes a providential vision of history not incompatible with the
210
evolutionary idealism in classical anarchist theories of history: for the early, idealist
Schelling, historical events disclose the ―progressive . . . revelation of the absolute‖ in
which freedom finally transcends necessity (209).
With the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom,
however, Schelling begins to think of the Absolute less in terms of an harmoniously
unfolding archē-telos than something radically self-divided and ―subject to suffering and
becoming‖ (66). The Freedom essay explicitly poses the vexed question of the
originating ―ground‖ of thought that challenges the utopian expectations of
Enlightenment rationality and introduces metaphysical entanglements that lead Schelling
to complicate his own prior idealism. For Schelling, rationality is not coextensive with
―what is original‖:
nowhere does it appear as if order and form were what is original but rather as if
initial anarchy (das Regellose) had been brought to order. This is the
incomprehensible base of reality in things, the indivisible remainder, that which
with the greatest exertion cannot be resolved in understanding but rather remains
eternally in the ground. (29)
In questioning what precedes the rational organization of the world, Schelling places this
organization in question by dissociating ―what is original‖ from its conventional
association with ―order and form.‖ As the incomprehensible but ―necessary inheritance‖
of existing beings, Schelling‘s original anarchy bespeaks an existence before existents
that, appearing to have been brought to order, nonetheless ―still lies in the ground, as if it
could break through once again‖ (29). As an irreducible remainder that conditions the
possibility of the Absolute‘s ―self-revelation‖ into order and form, anarchy figures as a
negativity that precludes freedom‘s ability to completely free itself from necessity, or
rather, circumscribes this freedom as possible only on the basis of its own impossibility,
on a ―Real‖ whose remainders can never be completely eradicated.
Moreover, Schelling transposes the tortured relation within the Absolute between
its self-revelation and the ―dark‖ ground into the existential structure of human freedom
as such. Where Schelling suggests the Absolute must effectively reveal itself as order and
211
form by sublimating the anarchy of its dark ground, the contingency of human freedom
allows for this hierarchy to be overturned, such that the ground can appear as the
―highest‖ value. This proto-deconstructive potential within human freedom is what
Schelling identifies as the freedom for ―evil,‖ which, in its simplest terms, describes the
freedom to elevate the individual part over the organic harmony of the whole.104
Nonetheless, Schelling‘s definition of evil cannot merely be dismissed within moral
terms that would simply juxtapose it with the good. For evil remains irreducible to
anarchy in the sense of a mere lack of order; that is, evil is not what ―lacks‖ or is deficient
in the good. Rather, as Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt point out, because evil is for
Schelling associated with the necessity and materiality of the ground, it has a ―positive,
vital force‖ in which ―all the powers that are typically associated with the good, such as
rationality, rigour, and probity, come to serve the most brutal and selfish impulses, the
ever-varying whims of physical desire‖ (xxiii).
This insight bears several different consequences for a romantic theory of
anarchē. On the one hand, evil can be the index of a deconstruction of reason itself.
Schelling‘s definition of evil might then illuminate the ―anarchism‖ of a character such as
Caleb, whose curiosity names the ground of a freedom in which the powers of ―natural
philosophy‖ and political justice are inverted to serve a darker impulse at the heart of
Enlightenment subjectivity. In this respect, as Pfau argues, Schelling‘s re-conception of
freedom as a power for evil rather than being grounded in the project of rationality
inaugurates a philosophical challenge to Enlightenment – carried out in more explicit
terms by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – that shows its projects ―(Liberalism,
Utilitarianism, Cosmopolitanism) and their concrete political programs (electoral, legal,
and economic reform, emancipation, liberation, Rights of Man, etc.) to be resting on
terminally unstable foundations‖ (―Beyond Liberal Utopia‖ 94).
104
One of Schelling‘s more interesting examples involves a comparison between evil and disease. Disease
is for Schelling a ―misuse of freedom,‖ describes the freedom by which a part of the body acts ―for itself‖
rather than in harmony with the rest of the organism (Philosophical Investigations 18, 34-8, 66). Disease is,
in a sense, the anarchic ground of the body. For izek, Schelling‘s notion of evil describes the paradoxical
figure of a ―universal singularity,‖ ―the point of utmost contraction, the all-exclusive One of selfconsciousness, and the embracing All. . . . [E]ach of them is in the same breath posited as united with its
opposite, as its opposite‘s inherent constituent‖ (The Indivisible Remainder 39, 45).
212
On the other hand, because evil has a kind of vitality, it might also name a more
subversive potentiality ―that threatens actively to undermine‖ the ―palliative normativity
that legitimates the whole‖ (Love and Schmidt xxiv). As such, ―evil‖ may very well also
describe characters such as St. Leon and Mandeville, whose negative ab-normality resists
inclusion into the ―whole‖ and thus forces a rethinking and potential reorganization of
what legitimizes itself as whole. Indeed, by the time of his 1815 Ages of the World,
Schelling critiques those idealisms that show a ―predilection for the affirmative‖ and
deny or repress the existence of ―something inhibiting, something conflicting . . . this
Other that which, so to speak, should not be and yet is, nay, must be . . . this No that
resists the Yes, this darkening that resists the light‖ (6). Schelling‘s language opens the
possibility of thinking anarchy in a rather different sense than vicarious revolutionary
freedom or mere disorder; instead, anarchy begins to appear as an index of what Rajan
has identified as a distinctively romantic ―crossing of potentiality and inhibition‖ that
resides in neither absolute idealism‘s utopian vision of freedom nor in the ―absolute
determination‖ of positivist versions of materialism (―Spirit‘s Psychoanalysis‖ 188). In
this sense, one might begin reconsidering romantic anarchism through an intellectual
history that runs through the radically different approaches of writers like Schelling,
Hegel, and Godwin, whose an-archic remainders have begun to appear within
contemporary reconsiderations of anarchism.
This study has attempted to demonstrate that Godwin‘s work anticipates
contemporary approaches to anarchism, specifically in its moments of resistance to the
reification of ―institutions,‖ whether in society or in the very forms of thought that would
ground anarchism itself. In doing so, Godwin‘s scrutiny of the foundations of his own
thought generates a literature whose tensions suggest a rational anarchism interminably
haunted by its own anarchē, exposing the radical uncertainties within the anarchist hope
for a society without institution. At the same time, such uncertainties do not simply assert
the bankruptcy of anarchism as a political philosophy. Rather, it is to acknowledge the
antagonisms both found within and generated by a form of thought that paradoxically
claims an absence of foundations as its very foundations, and whose negation of archē is,
as Bruns puts it, nothing other than the ―mobility . . . of uncontrolled questioning, without
beginning or end‖ (21).
213
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Curriculum Vitae
Name:
Jared McGeough
Post-secondary
Education and
Degrees:
University of Regina
Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada
1998-2003 B.A. (Hons.)
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
2003-04 M.A.
The University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada
2004-11 Ph.D.
Honours and
Awards:
Province of Ontario Graduate Scholarship
2006-07, 2007-08 (declined due to SSHRC), 2008-09
Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
Doctoral Fellowship
2007-08
Related Work
Experience
Teaching Assistant
The University of Western Ontario
2004-06
Sessional Instructor
University of Regina
2010-12
Publications:
McGeough, Jared Michael. ―The Falsehood of History and the Reality of Romance:
William Godwin‘s ‗Of History and Romance.‘‖ CLIO 39.3 (2009): 269-92.